Why Slowing Down Sped Up

and how it's slowing down again

Before dawn. The Rayburn stayed in, and I raddle it as quietly as possible, clearing an airway through the fire box by emptying ash into the pan. Held by the ubiquitous tool, I carry the pan out to the ash bin, the few sparks from its contents glowing bitter orange in the raven darkness.

Down the lane and across the road, a barn door squeals, and a thin strip of incongruous fluorescence escapes into the mist. The day is beginning on the pig farm, and before too long, Neil will be up and making ready to go to work.

Meanwhile, wrapped in a pale plaid shawl around my long, simple, hand made pinafore dress, I reawaken the fire, light the oil lamp, and settle with a mug of tea by the warmth of the stove to read my Bible.

The peace is palpable. No radio. No television. Even the fridge lives in the garage, so that no electrical noises mess with our peaceful home. Silence is a sweet benison.

Before long, two little girls will tumble downstairs, ready for breakfast, chores, and school work, and I will make my way to the back yard, to milk the goats.

That was how a day would start for me, nearly twenty years ago now, when my children were small.

We lived in a tiny tied cottage, on the end of a terrace of workers’ cottages, on a pig farm. We had nothing. A series of events had led to our financial collapse, and we lived, by necessity as well as choice, the simplest life we could find.

Slow, intentional living was oxygen to my faith, and to my time with my children. At that point, I had a seven year old and a five year old, both of whom were home-schooled, and who lived a lot of the time out of doors. There was air in those days, I could breathe.

I’m writing about those times now, as I try to capture a decade of simple living from what is now ‘long ago’ into a memoir which will hold it all for me and for them to look back on. Dwelling on those days is at once blissful and heart-breaking. It has caused some reflection and a bucketful of tears.

Between now and then, I have, somehow, come unglued.

While we still rented the same field, still kept goats, still grew vegetables - somehow we were not those people who are consciously choosing slow and simple.

Life intervenes. It’s not the same to impose that pattern on a twelve year old as it is a six year old. Much less at fifteen. Their lives get complicated, and you need to support them.

Financial imperatives mean that you take a part time job, then a full time job, then you get promoted, and before you know it, your life is your work, not your home.

Insecurity makes you move from the rented sector where you at least had that woodstove, and the big, working kitchen, to a tiny, pokey, shared ownership terrace where what you have is a cupboard for a kitchen, but a clenched fistful of security, and the way the rental market is right now, it’s hard to regret that one.

Since the pandemic, we’ve been trying to fight our way back to a way of life we love, we believe in, and in fact we need, in order to regain that breath.

For reasons too complicated, personal and painful to recall, I no longer have ‘a job’. I need to re-establish my business on the land. I need to help Neil keep his business up to scratch and try to improve our income from that.

This week, with a difficult diagnosis to come to terms with, a debilitating cold/virus to cope with, and the general awfulness of what is going on in our country, I feel as if I can take two courses. One is to cling like a madwoman to the slow and the simple, and blindly refuse to accept defeat.

Where you live, what you live in, the bricks and mortar around your bodily self simply don’t matter. However unsuited to Instagram, spinning raw sheep fleece on a wheel in your small, square, modern, sitting room still produces a yarn that is testimony to the simplicity and slowness of being.

Fermenting the vegetables you have grown, and storing them in the small, plastic clad refrigerator in your 2 metre square kitchen still produces healthful, slow, mindful food.

Choosing to live in this ultimate compromise of a house can in fact be a way for me to absolutely embrace the slow - it soothes the nerves of insecurity which renting kept inflamed, and (in theory at least) requires little attention or bandwidth. It’s a roof. My life is within, and then again without, at the field.

The other course is simply to lie down and give up. There have been days this week when that held an appeal, but it’s not in my nature.

I originally titled this newsletter ‘Slow’ and then changed its name to ‘Smallholder Journal’ but its lifeblood remains unchanged. To live slowly becomes harder with age and interventions, a growing family and commitments, and then, I pray, re-emerges from the mists as you grow old.

I believe there is time to reclaim my slow and simple life, and I shall.

That will-o-the-wisp of new, belated opportunity to live with truth and quietude is not reserved for those who already trod the path with younger, fresher, less tired feet. It’s available to anyone who chooses it. So please do join me.

Share your decisions, your simple triumphs, your little slow manifesto, in the comments. I’d love to hear from like minded folk, of all ages, but especially those with plenty of years.