16 April

Anybody else love The Good Life? One of those wonderful 1970s TV shows, about leaving the rat race, with the Goods (in the picture) deciding to be self-sufficient. As I got older though, I wondered how healthy the desire for self-sufficiency is. And now I run a mile from this sort of thing in real life, if you follow the history of every movement that goes ‘back to nature’, towards self-sufficiency, it ends badly. Why is this? I think because it stops us fixing the lives we’re living as a society, and instead gives us an escape from it, where all the same problems are then just transplanted somewhere else. Like how our countryside gets eaten up by ‘tree-changers’, sick of the filth and noise and crowding in the cities. But then our countryside just ends up full of filth and noise and crowding, nobody stops and fixes the actual problem.