Ash Tree Dieback

The latest in a long line of diseases that is apparently going to exterminate a species of tree from the English countryside is Ash Tree Dieback caused by the fungus Chalara fraxinea. In recent years there have been a number of scares threatening the extinction of various species of tree, including horse chestnuts, oaks, larches etc. etc. The whole idea of losing an entire species of tree, as happened to the Elm in England in the late 20th century is deeply emotionally affecting and has a strong resonance with the British public, for whom the idea of the wild wood is tightly bound with national identity.

The Ash is a mighty tree. If the oak is the symbol of England (and of Germany), the ash is the tree that makes the oak make sense. The oak is proud, resolute, the captain of the team. The ash is the first mate, as grand as the oak, if shorter lived, providing contrast and grounding. "Ash before oak, you're in for a soak, oak before ash it's only a splash."

In winter, the silvery greenish bark of an ash is clean and youthful even amongst the mud and leaves of the dead season. The black buds hold mystical significance for those who are tuned into them, and the seeds (called keys) are familiar to any child due to their helicoptering aerobatics. The ash is an important and well-loved tree. Fraxinus excelsior indeed.

We all feel we have a stake in the continued existence of the ash. We all feel like the wood simply being there is something that is owed to us, a duty that beholds God to us. Nature has a responsibility to provide us with ash trees.

Vanity. Agathon said: "Own nothing it would grieve you to give to another." If we suffer because of this, it is to our own egos that we must look. The ownership we feel over the ash, the identities we have formed that use the ash as an integral unit; these we must be willing to drop if need be. To worry or get upset over the future of the ash is a lesson to look within and remember what ownership is.

I sincerely hope that the ashes survive this threat. We should do everything we can to help them. We should allocate money and resources to this problem. I believe that even with limited resources we have a good chance of containing the disease, and also that there is a good chance we have over-emphasized the potential harm. But, in the end, if the ashes die, it's OK. I am proud to have been alive to know the woods of England in the 1990s. And I will be proud to greet the forests of 2020, no matter who lives there then. Own nothing it would grieve you to give to another. If the ashes are taken I will still be smiling.

Ambition

There have been periods of my life when I have voluntarily been out of work. These have been both good times and bad times, but they have been free times, responsible times, my time.

Economic arguments are bullshit. You don't need to earn money to live. Money buys lifestyle, nothing more and nothing less. There is food and waste everywhere in our landscape and society. There are burdocks breaking the tarmac in the corners of car parks. Bins overflow with useable produce. It is ego and fear that keeps people in work. It is the need to appear financially solvent, to puff ourselves up in the face of our fellow men and women that keeps us in work. It is our desire for fresh coffee and familiar brands that keep us going back to the same shops and supermarkets. Like a child in McDonald's, we all buy Jack Fulton's oven chips or Ecover washing up liquid.

There's nothing wrong with that. But no one needs to work to live. Work for your lifestyle all you want, but don't come to me saying there's no food on the table. There's food and shelter everywhere. Why is there such an overabundance? Because the West exploits the rest of the world in a trade game designed by the winners.

From the opposite angle, it is morally reprehensible to participate and condone a system in which people have to struggle for the essentials of life. What is necessary to life? The answer is necessarily subjective. Whatever you think you need must be made available to you by society. You are a human being. To be denied what is necessary to your life is the greatest sin that can be committed. There is nothing more fundamental than the dignity of humanity. You can't talk to someone without recognising that their humanity is equivalent to you own. It is not possible to communicate without theory of mind.

What about the gap between what is needed and what is given? The dissonance here will cause suffering if it is not addressed. Once the talking is over, there is nothing that can be done about the agency of others. If someone with a pile of food fails to share it there is no solution. The only realm over which you have control is your own agency. Your choices are: to suffer, or to modify your expectations about your needs. Perhaps you do not need Sky TV. Perhaps you do not need a KFC bucket meal. Perhaps there are plums rotting on the tree at the corner by the post office.

The picture gets harder for those that have dependants. It is easy enough to condemn those that have children. If you chose to reproduce, it's like taking out a mortgage where the currency is duty rather than dollars or pounds. Can you provide for your children without an income? Yes, but I would not recommend it. You have a duty to defend yourself from the expectations and prejudices of others - what good can you do should you be attacked by society? You have a duty to provide as socially normative an environment as possible for your children. There is more to being a human being than the mathematics of ethics. You must be able to pass in society, otherwise you will look unhuman in the eyes of the ignorant. The complexity increases if you are looking after the weak or the old. Tough hand, bro.

Despite these solutions being so tangible, I have felt guilty when I have not worked. I had thought people who asked "so what do you do?" or "when are you going to get a job?" were incredibly rude. I tried to forgive them - some were only making conversation and others were disturbed by their own unprocessed internal issues. But I could not fully move on because I was disturbed by my own unprocessed internal issue. I was puzzled. How could I so thoroughly lack ambition? But the problem wasn't one of appetite, it was one of definition. My ambition was at once larger and smaller than a career.

I started working again because it was easier than not working. The routine allowed me to shut off my overactive mind. It is hard to see through the structures of reality when you are tired from work. You fall into fellowship with others - this person is working to pay their rent, oh yeah, so am I. That seems reasonable and noble. It is reasonable. It is noble. But it is not the whole picture, and it is presented misleadingly. Why were we paying rent?

There was once a powerful wizard. He could see things that were occluded in fog to others. But he grew tired of explaining. To wade through the errors and emotions of the ignorant is exhausting. So he took a job at the sawmill and cut up timber all day long until he was able to go home, watch X Factor and pass out with a half eaten takeaway balanced on his growing gut.

Then I bought a house. Someone on my wage with my contract could never afford a house, that was the wisdom. It wasn't for us. Get back in line, know your place. Buying a house was easy. It was cheap; the mortgage was much cheaper than renting. All that had kept me in slavery to landlords was a tissue of fear. When I went to the bank in the boom time not believing they would accept me, they did not accept me. When I went in the recession with a tank of self-belief it all fell away and the clerks eyed me with reverence. Who was this buying at the height of a recession? I talked all the problems away. I didn't even sign their piece of paper. I just talked it away. I guess no one checked.

For some people this is enough. It is painful to want more. You must confront a million internal sufferings to deconstruct your slavery. Some people work their whole lives apparently satisfied with the reward of a box of bricks on a housing estate. Buying Tesco Finest. Living the high life for two weeks in Tenerife. That extra pint at the end of a night out.

I see them growing old. I see 60 million wasted lives. Newton invented optics, mechanics, calculus and ran the royal mint. Just make sure the kids have got a Spongebob Squarepants doll, but you don't need to mow the lawn this week.

I will set no limits on my ambition. Somewhere under the surface the goal has always been there but I have not been able to codify it or to say it out loud even when I could bring it into focus. "So what do you do?" I am preparing myself with the mechanisms and ideas to be able to make a lasting change to the ethics of our culture.

I have been toying with the pieces for a long time. I send ideas out into my immediate society and wait for them to come back. They do. I suggested musical things here, and they took root and somebody else grew them. I was constantly flattered, and I witnessed the corporeal body of the Zeitgeist. Clarity of sight. Brevity of communication. Say it in five words, or ten if you must. I have been staring at the mess that passes for ethics for far longer than I have been able to understand it. I have been constantly improving my communication skills. Toying with structure and rhetoric. As much as I am an outsider amongst men I have been watching, remembering, processing. I have been consciously writing this algorithm since before primary school. One of my earliest memories is making a pact with the universe: I will accept being socially awkward in exchange for it being necessary to understand the mechanics of what others do not even see is there.

Things can be better. I can help; I have been specialising for this. We've divided the labour. I've scouted it out and I'm starting to report back. Not today: I'm not ready yet. I've got too many things wrong, there are too many mistakes, too little understanding, too many neighbourhoods unvisited. But this is what I am doing. I am an archaeologist, I am a drummer, I want to be a writer. But above all of that I am going to improve. Am I an imaginier? That was rhetoric, a ruse. I am a human being.

How am I going to do this? What makes me think I can do this? The answer is the same to both questions. I have been working on my relationship with fate. I have looked inside of myself and I have seen the reflection of the garden. I am floored by tautological inevitability. Or, if you don't mind the language, I have knelt before the golden throne of God.

This is what it means to burn like the sun.

Explaining to his Wife

Explaining to his Wife

He pushed open the door into the kitchen, the mud from his hand marking where he had touched. A few drops of rain were in the air but he hesitated at the threshold.

Inside, his children sat at the table. One had a pencil and was scribbling on some paper. Next to the range his mother sat in her senility. His wife was the most animated; moving from pot to sink, labouring over the dinner.

They all knew that it was hard times elsewhere. They had heard that in the next county families shorn of dignity had suffered themselves to go up to the big house and been turned away. Prices had increased at the store. On the road, shabby men were moving on.

But there in the kitchen the dinner was nearly ready. The smell filled the air and all present felt that comfortable expectation of a meal in preparation.

Everybody felt that except for the husband at the door. He waited until he could catch his wife's eye. She was busy and it was no easy task to get her attention, but he had something to say to her that could not be said in front of the children. At last she noticed. He pointed outside with his head.

She picked up a towel, wiped the surface, threw down the rag, tidied her apron and bustled her way outside.

A moment's silence as the two of them stood together in the rain.

“I've looked at the crop.”

Neither of them showed any hint of emotion or reaction.

Then, plainly: “It is spoilt.”

“There's nothing to sell,” he said, “and nothing to eat.”

“You can't sell it if it's black, but we can still eat it, we've eaten worse.”

“We can't eat it.”

“Why not?”

“It isn't there.”

“You'll have to plant something else then.”

He was hurt. “It's August already and anyway we don't have any seed.”

“We'll buy some then.”

“With what?”

“We'll sell the cow.”

“We damn well won't. We're eating that beast, and the bitch too most likely.”

“Then what?”

“I don't know.”

Silence.

“There's blackberries. And limpets.”

The man walked inside and washed his hands. He touched his mother on the shoulder and sat down next to his children. Then his wife served the dinner.

Writing

Today I wrote 2,000 words of DifTW, the first that I haven't immediately thrown away since February 2010.

Comments on Knut Hamsun's "The Wanderer"

Some people who drive cars need to know exactly how the engine is made up in order to feel comfortable with the experience. Knut Hamsun needed to know exactly how life works for the same reason. Is it remarkable that I see my own experience in the set of questions he needed to answer? Perhaps we all see ourselves in his writing, and that is why he is a great author. I feel that the more I read, the more glimpses I am allowed of the true nature of truth and beauty.

The volume published in English as "The Wanderer" is made up of two short novels concerning mostly the same characters and locations: The Wanderer Under an Autumn Star (100 pages) and The Wanderer on Muted Strings (150 pages).

Under an Autumn Star is an abortive masterpiece. It feels unfinished, both in terms of the scope of the plot and revisions. I feel that further work on this would have produced something to rival Hunger or Growth of the Soil, and Hamsun probably did too, hence the sequel.

It is a work about class. In it we get to see a more realistic portrayal of the side of Hamsun presented in Hunger. Rather than starving because he has tied his head in knots, here he travels the countryside asking for manual work because he prefers it to living as a gentleman. Several times in this novel he resorts to his savings when it feels appropriate to him, but this does not diminish the effect in the same way as Jack Kerouac buying a train ticket across America in Big Sur. Here he has clear motivations (to experience work, to pursue women) whereas in Hunger it was harder to understand why he was doing what he was doing. Here there are characters other than the protagonist. Here he is a sympathetic figure, there the picture is more complex. If Hunger is a great work of art, this perhaps could have been a great short novel.

On Muted Strings is more mature, and shines less brightly. The protagonist returns to one of the scenes of Under an Autumn Star, and resolves the issues established there. We get to see many of the characters we came to know in the first novel again. It is readable, informed and still contains valuable insights, but it suffers the typical faults of being a sequel.

Comments about Knut Hamsun's "Growth of the Soil"

This is a work in which a man and a woman go into the wilds of Norway and carve out a farm. It discusses the nature and virtues of different modes of employment, prefering honest farming to mining, shopkeeping, service, working as a clerk etc.

My first reaction to this was to grow despondent about my own writing. This book had so many similarities with my own DIftW that I felt as though I had unconsciously plagiarised it somehow. Perhaps I had seen it as a film and forgotten about it? One of the things that Growth of the Soil shares with my own attempts is the sense of pace and its relationship with time: in both, time is expressed through changes in the seasons and the progress of natural events. The settings of both are an isolated farm in the woods, and both treat the idea of "town" in the same way. Both seek to instill moral judgements by presenting raw data and leaving it for the reader to transform it into information. I was ready to throw my work away when I realised that the two shared the same inciting incident: infanticide. But I will go on, I have a different flavour to offer, and would be greatly flattered if anyone ever considered my writing to be as scandinavian as Growth of the Soil.

Is Growth of the Soil a novel? There is very little structure to the work, and it trots along in a very naturalistic way with one event coming after another. It would be lazy to describe it as saga-like, but it does share a quality with the sagas in that there is a structure at work which completely disrespects the greek-derived idea of writing in acts. Growth of the Soil has an introduction of a page, and, arguably, an ending of a single, brilliant sentence: "Then comes the evening." I was so relieved when it ended like that because I had grown so emotionally attached to the faultless yet human Isak that I dreaded seeing him get old and die. Leave him in the woods working his farm.

I read the W. Worster translation, which I was somewhat wary of in comparison to the recent Sverre Lyngstad version. Should I wait and get a copy of that before reading the Worster? There was a smattering of unnecessary archaisms, although perhaps that is appropriate for an author like Hamsun, who is so tied up in the development of written Norwegian. At any rate, the Worster translation read easily. "Ho!"

Later in life, Hamsun supported Quisling's Nazi government in Norway and eulogised Hitler at the end of the war. I was on the look out whilst reading this, trying to assess whether there was anything right-wing or nationalistic about it. There is, but it is subtle and moderate, and at no point did I find anything as disturbing as, for a contemporary example, H.G. Well's occasional "nigger". The whole book is a work describing the relationship between people and land, but there is little "blood" to accompany the "soil". It might be possible, if you were insistant upon it, to denounce Hamsun through his portrayal of Sami people. At one point he describes them as lazy and keen to avoid the town, and he portrays them as beggars and, through the hare incident, a vector for immorality. I do not think it is reasonable to ascribe this to racism, as he treats the sami way of life as he viewed it in the same way he treats many other cultural modes within the book. If Hamsun had died in the 1930s we would not even be talking about it.

Growth of the Soil sits easily in the top 1% of books. If it has a flaw it is that it need not be so long: everything of value is communicated in the first hundred pages, and the rest is just reiteration and detailing. However, I was completely engrossed by it and loved every page. The emotional dips are so poignant that I was greatly relieved each time Hamsun reprieved his characters. This is a delicacy of a book, and to gorge on the full 450 pages has been one of the great delights of my life.

Review of Knut Hamsun's "Hunger"

Just a quick one; I'm reading Growth of the Soil at the minute and have loads to say about it, but I read Hunger first and just want to sketch down a few things about that before they're gone from my mind.

This book was a gift, and I had not heard of it and knew nothing about the author except for his name and a vague recollection that he had something to do with the codification of written Norwegian. I was taken aback when I received it and did not quite know what to do with this object that was in my hands.

It is a book about an unemployed middle class character who struggles to acquire food in Victorian Oslo.

After reading a few pages I was completely hooked. At first I did not enjoy it; I was fully rapt but it was more a grotesque appeal than pleasure that I was experiencing. In the anonymous narrator (almost the only character in the book) I saw a mirror of myself, showing me my own madness in uncomfortable detail. At first, I understood this work as an extremely sophisticated portrayal of the realities of a certain class of mental illness (though I would not try and categorise it). Later, I came to see how shockingly innovative it is. I am still struggling to accept that this novel was written as early as 1888: if it were a new novel published today I expect people would still be astonished by its artfulness.

I find myself still meditating on it, and doubtless I'll come to understand it better in time. Already, however, I have repeatedly caught myself acting out weaker versions of the hero's oddities of behaviour and have come to understand myself and others a little better than I had before I read this work. It is as if I have been granted a few additional algorithms for understanding life. My universe is slightly more complex, yet better understood than it was before. Truly this is a valuable book.

I read the recent Sverre Lyngstad translation, which was excellent.

One more thing I would like to jot down is the way in which, towards the end of the book, the author very gently shows how the narrator had got himself into this state. It is so subtley delivered that a thoughtful reading is required to bring it out, but it is objectively there. Sympathy for this mad character turned into empathy, and in doing so the insanity is no longer some alien other, but a different facet of us.

A Nightmare

Last night I had the worst nightmare I can remember ever having. I woke up terrified and shaking at 6:00am, and was still agitated at around 7:45am as I watched the dawn.

The nightmare took place in the third person; I was not part of events but rather just watched them happen. At times I saw events through the eyes of those involved, but I always felt as though it was other people this was happening to.

I grew up near a certain wood, Knott Wood, and as a young child I did not know what was on the far side of it. I had been told there was a river down there somewhere but had not seen it. In my dreams I filled in the landscape beyond the wood with creative recombinations of aspects of places I was familiar with. This fictional landscape is still available to me in my dreams and I visit it at least once every few months. It is a place of great comfort, a nostalgic expression of lost childhood, of idealised England, and of a perfect past before the hand of mankind interfered with nature. There is an almost autistic absence of other people.

In my dream, the men and company of the Dangerous Ideas wood were holding a summer celebration with a bonfire in Knott Wood. Three teenage boys were trying to organise to take a girl swimming in the river beyond the wood (this felt like William Morris' "beyond the world"). She was a real person I used to know. It got later and later and the swimming trip turned to a camping trip and the girl dropped out but the boys were determined to continue. Eventually they got permission from one of their fathers, but he was drunk and not from the area. Anyone else would have forbidden them from doing so.

So they went down to the river, and to their surprise they found an abandoned hamlet built along the river. I had never visited this location in my dreams before, being slightly upstream of where I had explored before this point. I have a vague recollection of not being able to explore in this direction perhaps fifteen or twenty years ago and of there being something vaguely sinister about it. The three boys were a little disturbed that the first abandoned house they came to had been broken into, but had not been looted or touched in any way despite containing valuable and useful items. Nonetheless, there was a pleasant grassy sward outside which was flatter than any other available spot, and they decided to lie there in their sleeping bags. I think this location was inspired by a house in the alps whose driveway I turned around in once.

As darkness fell, a dog appeared and one of the boys began to make a fuss over it. For the rest of the night the other two boys were unable to get him to do anything but play with the dog.

Then the narrative changed to one of the boys reading back what he had written in a book he had taken from the house. It was a two-page form printed in the front of a book, to be filled in to record the details of the location and registrar filling in the book. The boy had filled it in with a plain childish account of their camping expedition, ignoring the prompts on the form. Then he turned to the next page and each page contained a filled-in record of secret mass burials that had occured in the parish. Two of the dates were 1932 and March 1935. I felt that the present in the dream was the late 50s or early 60s.

This was the third boy who was occupied with the book, the first having the dog. The second boy was asleep but was being irritated by something in the dark. It was just irritating enough for him to wish it would stop but not irritating enough for him to get up and investigate. What was happening was that he was being gently poked in the feet with two sharp implements. I have shivers running all over my body writing this.

Then a second "dog" came to the third boy, who was by now also half-asleep. He was aware that this wasn't really a dog and that something was badly wrong. I feel utterly terrified recounting this; I am shivering and have to pause frequently. I do not want to go on; I will not proof-read this. The boy could not bring himself to recognise that it was not a dog, because it would be too terrible to acknowledge the truth. And so he played with it, half-asleep, as though it were a dog. Slowly he came round as far as he could allow himself to: he could not acknowledge the truth, it must remain a dog for the time being in order to preserve his sanity, but he could accept that something was wrong and that he had to get the three of them together to leave that place.

He looked at the first boy, and all of this was written over his face. He had been trapped for some time, not brave enough to bring himself as far as the point the third boy had reached. They looked at the second boy, but were unable to allow themselves to take in what they saw, so they just grabbed him and pulled him with them.

They walked together up the slope back to the main party of adults, but when they were almost there they realised that what they were dragging was not the second boy, but was something else they could not acknowledge. They had left him asleep and alone down there. With heavy hearts they turned and went back for him, knowing that they likely did not have enough willpower to succeed.

The narrative changed to the next day. A few parents were in a helicopter searching for the boys. The helicopter swept over the forest, and closed in on the river. One of the boys was in the river. At first he appeared to be a floating corpse, but then it became clear he was struggling. Underneath him were - two sheep? - two inflated sacks providing buoyancy. He was using the sacks to keep himself apart from something that was underneath the water, trying to drown whatever was there.

Then it surfaced, the face of a man, or something very similar, three times the size of a man and much flatter and more cartoony. The face was surrounded by thick dark-brown matted hair and the expression was one of manic friendship. The long tongue hung out like a dog's, and it seemed to be playing with the boy, making the boy think there was a chance of drowning the fiend, but all the time the monster was in complete control. The thing rolled around the bottom of the sacks and came up, showing himself to be hairy all over, looking like a wild brown version of Sulley from Monsters Inc. It had two horns like Desperate Dan had on his cow pie, which had been tickling the second boy the previous night. It sounds ridiculous but it was most real and terrifying and I am scared now writing.

The helicopter pilot recoiled and flew away as fast as he could. He would forever be a broken man, and the parents would not argue that this terror was too large to be faced, even at whatever the cost to their sons would be. There was a sense that the boys were far beyond help, and that the best anyone could do would be to get as far away as possible.

And then I woke up.

Review of Halldor Laxness' The Fish Can Sing

I have recently, very slowly, read nobel prize winning Icelandic author Halldor Laxness' novel The Fish Can Sing (Brekkukotsannáll). This was a very important experience for me, and I would like to document my reactions to it, if you will indulge me.

For a long while it has been my intention to read some of his work, but I had a strong sense that I should wait until the time was right. A few weeks ago my subconscious informed me that it was time. I selected The Fish Can Sing on the basis that it was the cheapest of his English translations available on Amazon, and was delighted to discover that it had been translated by (mastermind presenter) Magnus Magnusson. I have read a number of sagas translated by him and consider him to have done a very fine job of them.

At its best, the novel is beautifully written, with each phrase dripping with devastatingly understated emotional power. This work contains some of the very best prose poetry I have encountered: I found myself haunted by certain passages and sentences, particularly by the stoic humanity of the nostalgic Iceland presented as the foil to the tainted petty bourgeois present in the book. In this I was reminded very strongly of the Orcadian author George Mackay Brown, and I was ecstatic to be able to draw such strong comparisons across the Norwegian sea.

To a certain degree this book has a similar sentimentality for a lost past to Cider With Rosie, which was published in the same year (1959). That this book treats this idea at face value dated it somewhat for me. I need my cultural nostalgia to be a little more disguised.

It's hard to be certain working from the English translation, but at times the novel uses Icelandic, Danish, Nynorsk, French, German and Latin, all for different effects. This must have been a struggle to render for a language-illiterate english speakers. At times Magnusson has to resort to "...they prayed in Nynorsk" or "more in Danish than Icelandic", whereas presumably the original Icelandic assumes the reader can interpret the different languages used. The short French, German and Latin passages are left in their original forms, which is appropriate to their use in the novel to highlight certain character's naivety, both positively and negatively.

I enjoyed the Icelandic setting, which is a particular interest of mine, and picked up on a number of cultural references and nuances (undoubtedly I missed many more), such as unflagged references to sagas, that perhaps would be prohibitive rather than enhancing for a casual reader with no knowledge of the setting.

At times I felt physically stunned by cunning revelations in the structure of the threads running through the book. But I also felt little compulsion to carry on reading. These were characters that I related to, but that I felt perhaps deserved respect and privacy. The sympathetic characters were not the sort of people who would naturally have placed themselves in the spotlight and I felt presumptuous demanding and explanation of their world. The novel is almost entirely devoid of plot (plenty of fate, but little causality) and I did not feel like there was any question I wanted answered or any narrative idea to see through to the conclusion. In this respect it was like a long description interspersed with discourse. Each morsel was as rich as a five-aurar cake, but nothing beyond gluttony and work ethic drove me on.

Another strong criticism I have is that the writing standard was very variable. Chapter 15 was a sophisticated maelstrom of poetry and ideas, but Chapter 16 read like something written by a self-important university student on a wet afternoon. I found it hard to believe it was the same writer. The last third of the book read like it had been written before the earlier passages, as things which were already introduced were reintroduced and other subtle changes occurred without explanation.

This is a great book that I highly recommend. But had I written it myself, I would have seen only its shortcomings. There are glorious, heart-stopping moments, but it does perhaps add up to less than the sum of its parts. I'll read more Laxness in the future, but Mackay Brown's Greenvoe is possibly a better example of this class of novel.

Space

Once again, I have been asking myself "what is to be done?" In 2006 I set myself a complex agenda which is now 100% complete and achieved. From time to time I added various small goals and extensions to that plan, and sometimes succeeded in kidding myself that I had a new set of goals and had reached a new stage in my life. With the Isle Martin Plan and its modifications complete, I have been once again asking myself "what is to be done?"

Whilst I am very happy where I currently live in the short term, what I would most like to do is inhabit a space where I would not be disturbed by the rules and expectations of those around me. Just as moving out of my parent's house was liberating when I was 18, I would like to move beyond the confines of 20-something shared housing into a world where I can define the parameters more freely. I do not wish to replace these rules with another set of rules, such as "living on a council estate", "living in a commune" or enforced nomadism.

Recently, I have found myself deeply regretting not being able to take various dead animals (roadkill fox and badger, two ravens) home and process them. I would like to spend a winter sleeping on a mattress of rotting bracken. I would like to be able to fill my attic with straw without anyone saying "planning permission" or "housing code". I would like to collect plants into a garden, and no, I am not at all interested in most of the plants you keep in yours. I would like to be able to dig a hole when I feel like it, and leave an open pit around for people to fall into. I would like to build furniture in ways no one but Syd Barrett would approve of. I would like to leave a brick on a synthesizer turned up loud for several hours whilst I cook meals you would not eat. I would like to be able to mess up the mains electrics and I would like to paint and texture things in ways that would reveal your aesthetic conservatism.

These are my goals. I believe that to achieve them I have to take control of a unit of geography. This seems vile to me, an affront to nature and a denial of "love thy neighbour". But in the cost/benefit analysis, it becomes clear that I must make myself look big and threaten trespassers with violence.

For some months now, I have been looking at houses for sale. They seem ill equipped for my needs. What I would like is a large garden with a shed in it. Whilst I take my responsibilities seriously with regard to eutrophication in an overcrowded world, there are very few parts of a "house" that I am interested in retaining. Roofs seem useful. But what is the boiler for, other than the socially-dictated generation of debt?

One solution would be to acquire a ruin and live in a shed in the garden. I do not know how to achieve this. Another would be to get a wood and hide in it. Here I am vexed by availability.

It is clear to me that the price of a house is dependent upon the availability of land. Bricks and mortar are cheap, and anyway I'm not bothered if they're all there (although you seem to need me to be concerned, and I suspect will force me to be so). Land is highly available in areas where the hand of the king is weak. The more slummy an area is, the less invested both the inhabitants and the authorities are, and the cheaper land becomes. A lack of investment leads to a weakening and diversification of polities (modelled continuously), and a greater concern for defining the boundaries and setting the rules I wish to escape. Or, in short, I would not go down very well on a council estate.

Secondly, the things you value in a house, the heuristic you call "well presented" has no value to me. "Well presented" is a burden, and entanglement of denial and a demand disguised as a duty to curate somebody else's ideological subjectivism. It is a threat against John Stuart Mill's property, and I bet there's magnolia in there somewhere.

I am spoilt by the freedoms of a rural middle class youth. It occurred to me only months ago that I was waiting for the large suburban house everyone around me had had growing up to fall into my lap. Unknown consciously, I had an expectation that I was due such a thing and that it was only a matter of time before I was burdened with such. The slow lumbering approach of home ownership felt like an unavoidable onerous task, something moderately irritating like having to clean your teeth or waiting for a train, coming towards me immalleably through the semi-accessible mists of the future. Now I have identified this misconception, perhaps it will allow me to move on.

I want to slip through the holes in the fabric of your social paradigm. I don't want to cheat or take shortcuts, I just have different expectations and have a closer relationship with fate than you do. The whole tangled ball of this system is only tenable because each of us sees only a few facets, distracted as we are with our egotisms and opiates. For better or for worse, the parts I am looking at don't add up. There is great narrative truth in several million small agents working selfishly, but in order to sustain the journeys we are on, we require a million small fibs and unnecessary regulations and abstractions.

I suppose what I want is to be left alone, to select what elements of culture and humanity I come into contact with. When feeding my ego, I would describe this desire as a true, pure liberalism. But it is truer to say that I don't want my million small fibs to be challenged any more than you do.

This is why I am living in my friend's attic.