Reflections in a muddy puddle (the puddle being my mind)

The last pot of honey

Sigh! My porridge will never be the same! For five years we have had a jar of honey on the breakfast table, honey produced by our own bees in our own garden. The last, now empty jar is a symbol of how our lives have taken a very different track from the one we were headed on five years ago. 

Back then, in 2013, we had a five star B&B business, a large house and garden and working to supply our guests with a king’s breakfast - free range eggs from our own chickens, home baked organic breads and muffins, apple juice from our own apple tree, locally produced bacon, cockles and laverbread, high quality, locally sourced dairy goods, and our own honey. Our breakfasts were always well received and and at one point we extended our hospitality with afternoon teas and an evening meal menu. Persuaded by my son, William, we established a vegetable garden, in spite of Gareth’s reluctance to dig up the lawn and erect some greenhouses. My darling boy took on the role of head gardener, planted some potatoes and various other things and then promptly moved off in search of a life with his lady love. I kept it going for a while until caring for my parents took over.

I digress a bit. The point I am making is that things have changed considerably since then. The death of four parents and the associated house clearances changed our outlook completely. Life is too short. Everybody says so, and the opportunities for manifesting our dreams are few and far between in the busy years. So we reviewed our situation and came up with the current one of ‘living differently’; differently from the way we had been living anyway. As I've already told you, there are loads of people doing what we are doing right now, travelling around the country in motorhomes or caravans, leaving the day-to-day concerns of ‘standard’ lifestyles behind. Happy, healthy and affluent retirement is a fact for many of my generation and they are busily spending their children’s inheritance (I know that's a sweeping generalisation, but it's what the younger generation like to think).

Affluence is a relative notion of course (it depends on whether your relatives have more money than you 😉) and Gareth and I are trying to live our new life as un-affluently as possible. And herein lies a dilemma. Ethics for me isn't a place in the south of England (as my father used to joke) and I like to think that I am ecologically sensitive and actively Earth-caring. Plastic waste is something I have railed against and I have vowed to reduce my own use of the material. Try doing so when you're trying to live cheaply, though, and it seems impossible! Yes, we recycle, but that's a bit like locking the stable door after the horse has bolted. 

Another value that I tried to uphold is community support and non-reliance on the Big Corps. In running our B&B we found that without cutting our costs considerably we were earning well below the minimum wage. Cost cutting unfortunately entailed supermarket shopping instead of from small local producers and retailers. I am ashamed to say that as we travel about in our camper our   food store is almost entirely supermarket bought apart from milk, bread and eggs that we buy along the way. The lovely little towns and villages that we have passed through are dotted with little businesses trying to eke out a living, as we did with the B&B. Each depends on enticing locals and tourists to come in and buy. The appearance of motorhomers in February must be a welcome sight, but a huge disappointment when they are seen eating their Lidl-bought lunches and dinners in their diesel spewing pods and then moving on.

Gareth is all for economy; our economy, that is. Left to me, we’d be bankrupt by now. I'd have supported every little restaurant, tea room, bakery and gift shop, be fat and diabetic and have more stuff to carry than we have room for (and it wouldn't be plastic). He has actively found us cheap campsites, researched every item for best prices (which are inevitably via Amazon) and avoided parking charges with a passion.  Maybe Ethics really is somewhere in the south of England.

Having now travelled from coast to coast through Lancashire and Yorkshire at the moment we are parked up at my sister’s campground in Lincolnshire for a few days and as you can tell, I am finding time to reflect on these things. At the age of 64 I am still a bit of an idealist. Realism doesn't and never has affected me much; that's what Gareth is for.