Turtles-Paradise

Food has often been one of the most expensive items on our list of expenditures – even by making a weekly meal plan, shopping for stuff that was on sale, downgrading to the store brand and making lots of things from scratch – we would spend between £230 – £260 a month on food for the two of us.

Last month I managed to drag our spending on food right down – to £180. How did I do this?

By shopping every day. I gave myself a daily budget of £5, and from that £5 I had to get breakfast, lunch and dinner for the two of us. I thought it would be more difficult than it was. By shopping every day on my way home from work, I was able to pick up the fruit and veg that was being reduced, and snap up any major bargains. It meant I didn’t have to plan beyond the next three meals, so I never forgot any vital ingredients. I frequently came in under budget, which was a dramatic difference from my weekly shopping.

It didn’t even mean that I missed out on bulk buys – picking up 8 cans of baked beans on a ‘Buy 2 for £3′ deal, and several ‘buy one get one free’ deals on frozen pies etc.

It did mean I had to downgrade some things. I couldn’t spend £4 on two slices of cheesecake for a start. I also had to downgrade my washing powder – to a brand that actually made my clothes smell nicer.

In short I would say the experiment has been a great success. I certainly haven’t felt deprived – especially since I’ve been feasting on a fantastic greek salad for the last three days – olives are always amazing!

I’ve gotten rid of a lot of items since I started the Great De-Cluttering Project. The gameboy is gone, a large number of books, the second iPod. Most of the surfaces in my house are a lot clearer. But then, in the middle of archiving all the data from my pile of CD’s, I ran into a problem.

Namely, a space problem. I have a 120gb external harddrive – and it’s full. That’s a lot of data. The problem is, most of it is important – old artwork files, photographs, writing, music, and web-design work. Stuff I want to keep. Memories of who I used to be, old friends, and long journeys to places that changed me.

But, I have no space. I have the virtual equivalent of an overflowing house, and a moving van parked outside. So what do I do?

• I could upgrade. I could buy a 1tb hard-drive for about £65, and never run out of space again (until I do)
• or, I could delete stuff. I could decide that actually, 13gb of music – that’s 2919 songs, or 8 solid days of non-repeating music – is overkill. Especially when I haven’t listened to over 70% of them in years. I could go through the photographs, keep the ones that have special meaning, and delete the thousands of generic and fuzzy shots of flowers, clouds, and people’s backs. I could pare the artwork down to the few pieces I am actually proud of, and dump the experiments with software and colour.

It’s easy to ignore digital clutter. It doesn’t take up physical space in our house and lives – we can truly forget it’s even there. But it is still clutter. You end up losing the few important things in a sea of junk.

Digital clutter is insidious. It’s too easy to download a free song, a free e-book, to sign up to another free RSS feed, another newsletter, and to shove all your half-finished projects onto another hard-drive. After-all, virtual space is endless, right?

Not quite. Apparently, by 2020, we’ll have 35 zettabytes of data globally, and will be struggling to find the room to store it all. The question, of course, is how much of that data is actually worth keeping. In all the frantic digital activity of the last couple of years, as everyone turns to content creation and content sharing, as people get used to tweeting what they had for dinner and facebooking every interaction – will we have enough space to keep it all backed-up? Will there be huge warehouses, filled with gigantic hard-drives, all backing up each trivial comment ‘just in case’?

Don’t get me wrong. That everyone has a cheap and convenient outlet for their creative sides is amazing. That we have leapt into the ‘age of information’ is something to be impressed by, not scared of. But we should all try and make sure that the data we produce isn’t just noise, but is actually meaningful in some way.

Otherwise all the great ideas, the amazing artwork that moves us to tears, the songs that kept us alive through puberty, the writing that opened new doorways in our minds – these will be buried beneath a hundred you-tube videos of someone falling downstairs, a thousand spurious e-books full of fluff and mis-information, and a million doodles of stick-men.

Which isn’t to say that stick-men can’t be genius.

Strawberries at wimbledon, and minty pea-soup to sip in the garden. June passes us by, and July gets ready to burst onto the scene – in, I hope, a gloriously sunny month that let’s me take long rambly walks through fields of wild-flowers.

July is all about barbecues, picnics, salads and refreshing glasses of ice-cold lemonade. Family gatherings, water-balloon fights, and siestas in the sun. Bliss!

Eating what’s in season has a number of benefits. It’s cheaper, it’s healthier, and it keeps us in touch with the cycles of nature. When we can buy strawberries in December, or pumpkins in April, the food loses a touch of what makes it special. Anticipation, after all, is half the fun of anything.

The Best Food of July

Cherries – ripe, luscious little fruits that taste like nothing else. Unfortunately, Britain has lost around 90% of its cherry orchards in the last 50 years, in favour of importing them from overseas. July 17th is Cherry Day, so go pick your own from a local orchard, or buy some from a farmer’s market. Cherries can be used to make fruity buns, sauces for meat, or delectable pie fillings. Or just eat them by the handful. Om nom.

Peaches – peaches are another refreshing fruit. Somehow, the idea of eating a peach with juices running down my chin while sitting under a cloudless blue sky is my idea of heaven. If you like peaches, you’ll be pleased to know that peach trees can be grown in containers. Just make sure they get lots of sunshine. And make sure you get lots of sunshine as well – we all thrive and grow during the sunnier months.

Cucumber – cumbers are cool. They’re famous for it, in fact. And, when you get a bit hot and bothered, or maybe don’t like the sun quite as much as the peach tree – a cumber is the perfect antidote. A cumber salad makes for a good lunch, or as a trusty side for a bbq. If you feel a bit worn out, you can lie down with a couple of cumber slices on your eyes. Or, you can drink it.

Fennel – It’s not all fruit and salads. You might still want your sunday roast, or fancy something a bit more filling. Enter fennel, a vegetable I was first exposed to as part of my veg box delivery (for those of you unable to get to a market, one of these can really help you support a local farmer – I really miss it), and which I instantly fell in love with. It looks a bit like it came from outer-space, and it tastes like aniseed. Aniseed is one of those flavours you either love or hate, so if you didn’t like the sweets you won’t like this. It goes well in a risotto, and makes a perfect match with fish.

Spinach – spinach is in season through most of the year, which suits me just fine. As a leafy green, spinach is one of those nutritional powerhouses that – whilst not turning us into Popeye – has a truly insane amount of vitamin K and A. Plus a bunch of other things, all of which are good for you. Add it to a salad, steam it as a side, or dump it into a fruit smoothie and turn that smoothie a beautiful shade of green.

Peas and Beans – Peas, green beans and broad beans are all being picked and podded right about now. Add them to that risotto, or enjoy them with fish and chips. Vegetarians can enjoy this tasty walnut and green bean dish – well, and so can the rest of us. Don’t you just love summer?

This is a mere sampling of what’s on offer right now, but it makes a good start. Remember to buy local – if you shop in a supermarket, look for the British sticker. Alternatively, visit a farmers market, or get a veg box delivered. Fresh, in-season produce – it simply cannot be beaten.

Eat well. Exercise.

That’s the simple mantra for a healthy life. You can make it complicated – eliminating certain foods, eating a strict diet, and sticking to a regimented and punishing gym-schedule. But most of us don’t have the time – and for most of us, any kind of exercise is better than none.

So here is my ultra-simple list of five incredibly simple exercises you can do – no gym membership, no equipment, and dead easy for beginners.

1. Walking

Walking is the easiest, simplest way to get some activity into your life. Walk to the shops. Walk to work. Walk to a friend’s house. Walk around the block. Walk through the forest, up the mountain, across the fields.

Walking is incredibly under-rated as a mode of transport. You can walk a lot further than you think, and it’s a lot less stressful than driving. It’s easy to fit into your day to day life too – in fact, why don’t you go for a walk right now? This blog will still be here when you get back.

2. Starjumps, squats, pull-ups, press-ups

I know. I hate repetitive, routine exercises too. So the easiest way to work the jumps, splits, squats, pull-ups, press-ups and other bodyweight exercises is to vary it up. Combine different movements. Make it playful – remember when you were a kid, and you used to just randomly run around and jump on things? Moving is fun, and playgrounds are great places to go if you just want to climb trees, have a go on the monkey-bars, and play ‘lava-monsters’.

3. Dance

Dancing is amazing. Okay, it’s not quite minimalist in that it requires a source of music, but I’m going to assume that if you can read this post, you can get onto youtube. Go find some upbeat music, and dance like you’ve never danced before. Nobody’s watching, so just let yourself go crazy.

As a variation, try some martial arts. Pretend you’re Bruce Lee being attacked by a hundred ninjas, and get those high-kicks and super-quick punches flying.

4. Yoga

You might want a mat. But you don’t need one, really. I can’t praise yoga enough, it’s one of those things that always makes me feel better, even if I just find five minutes to really stretch. I don’t need to go into much detail here, as the famous Everett Bogue has already written the best guide to minimalist yoga around. I should note that I’ve been using his routine very successfully for the past few weeks.

5. Play with some kids. Outdoors.

Children are whirlwind dynamos of energy, and keeping up with them can be hard-work. So do your local stressed out parents a favour, and take their kids for a day out somewhere. Go to a park, and play football or frisbee. Explore the woods or some caves. Play old playground games, like ‘stick in the mud’. Or just chase them around until they or you collapse!

Now here’s the catch. To make it worth doing, you need to keep doing it. So slow down. Make it a habit to walk to work. Agree to take the kids out once a week. Make Tuesday night the night you put on your sequins and turn the volume to eleven. Make yoga part of your nightly wind-down routine.

Now – wasn’t that easier than you thought it would be?

Living a balanced life is something that I feel is they key to happiness. The growth of minimalism, the surge of interest in working for yourself as an online entrepreneur, the desire to live simply and connect with the people around – it all seems to be a reaction to a materialistic, and unbalanced life that has come to be seen as normal.

We are encouraged to believe that working relentlessly until we are 65 is what life is about. School has become increasingly like the world of work – where endless exams, projects, paperwork and uniforms take the place of play and exploration. Work has taken over more and more of our lives, with salaried workers regularly putting in more hours than contracted for, and those with part-time, minimum wage jobs frequently having to take on two or three jobs just to make ends meet.

Meanwhile, the gap between the haves and the have-nots has widened so that in 2006 the top 2% of the world population owned more than half of the worlds wealth. In order to afford the ‘standard of life’ that advertisers tell us is both normal and desirable, we are forced to take on debt, work overtime, and pay most of our income towards the upkeep of an unsustainable lifestyle. A few talented people make millions, a few lucky people inherit millions, and the rest are left to lurch from financial crisis to financial crisis.

The other day, I had to repot some of my plants. I went to the garden centre, and I paid for a few sacks of dirt. Yes, dirt – the very stuff this planet is covered with. Others pay for bottled water. It won’t be long before someone figures out how to sell us oxygen.

My very simple solution is:

• Spend less.
• Work less.
• Have more fun.

Spend Less

Downsize your house. Better still, get rid of your house. Live out of a van, or a tent, or a spare room. Learn to see the true cost of things – a £200 washing machine is nearly 30 hours of work at £7 an hour. A £400 iPad is nearly 60. A £200,000 house is 3.2 years of non-stop, 24 hour work.

The places to cut your costs are the places where you spend the most. Your rent. Your food. Your entertainment splurges. Eat more lentils. Is that chicken tikka take-away really worth spending an extra hour at work?

Work Less

Once you’ve cut your costs to the bone, you can afford to work less. Take a single part-time job. Start a minimalist business. Work from home. The less you spend, the less you need to worry about earning.

Have more fun

When you’re not working, what are you going to do instead? You’ll finally have the time to travel. To learn new skills. To cook properly. To have long, silly conversations on the telephone. To take long walks. All the things that you don’t have time for now.

I should make it clear that I’m not there yet. Unlike the many people out there that have succeeded in quitting their full-time jobs and spend their time doing what they love I still work 37 hours a week or so, and I still have a large rent payment and a lot of stuff.

But I’m determined. I’ve spent the last year reading amazing blogs. I now know that it is possible. In a year, we’ll be heading to a place we don’t have to pay rent. In that year, I’m going to work on getting rid of as much of our belongings as possible, so that we don’t have to pay to move it or store it, and so we can start with the wonderful possibility that empty space creates.

I’m working towards a balanced life. What are you working towards?