What do I get passionate about? Things that make me feel joyful, delighted, happy.

Sharing them with you sounds like a project worth doing, though I know myself well enough by now to avoid promising to do one every day for a week, much less a year. So I’ll stick to just posting when the mood strikes.

My very first Happy Thing: taking my cats for a walk on the beach. I’ve written about this before, but the joy I feel with these two, listening to the waves roll in, smelling the seaweed and salt, feeling the wind and warmth of the sun.

Perhaps more than almost anything else, these walks define my daily life and remind me to pay attention and be happy. I took along our new videocamera and, having heard somewhere that 3 seconds is the average shot these days, what you get is a slice of our life today, in 3 second doses.

May it bring a smile to your face too.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB2DS12QCx4

I love how this woman, Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, is so clearly being herself.  She’s not shy about saying not only what she really thinks, but much more impressively and rarely, what she truly feels. That raw honesty and sincerity earned my respect and appreciation.

Hope you enjoy it too.

It starts with a tapestry.

The Coming Storm tapestry

My first handspun project

As I mentioned previously, I wanted to knit a tapestry based on a photograph I took of our view. It was my first time working with dyes, carding wool, and spinning. I whittled and sanded the knitting needles from birchwood Malcolm collected for me down in the Cairngorms (wood being too rare here to gather).

I wasn’t sure if I’d actually finish it, it took so much time. But I was determined and today at last it’s done.

I decided to hang it next to our kitchen window, which is almost exactly the same view as I took in the photo. It makes me smile to see the colours and texture, and it’ll do me good to have something pretty to look at while I work on the computer.

Hanging next to the real view

Success is having enough

After a brief daydream about someday selling this kind of thing, I decided to stick with doing it for my own pleasure and for gifts. I’m happier that way.

Success in this case isn’t selling it, but enjoying my tapestry and feeling I completed a challenging project, especially as a beginner. I have to remind myself that it’s okay to be a novice, to be okay with making mistakes or having something come out not perfect.

The inspiration

At first I resented not being able to sell it — I’m not sure it’s good enough and more importantly, I loathe the idea of marketing it, even on a website — since that meant I wouldn’t have the money to keep doing my hobby. I’d have to stop spinning and dyeing.

This is one of those testing moments you have when you’ve decided to stick to a budget. You look for ways around it, and if you’re me, you throw a little tantrum when you can’t find one and you know you’re going to have to give it up, at least for a while.

But as the storm settled, I got to thinking again about the concept of having “enough”, of appreciating what’s there instead of always longing for more. Even simple things like a new craft offers me that chance to practice.

Because really, I’ve made so much yarn and related stuff for this I’ve got more than enough. To acquire more wool is unnecessary, and soon I’d have bags and bags of stuff I don’t use. More bags, that is, since I already have other bags of yarn and fabric for my crafty-ness.

And perhaps by having a limited supply I will be able to appreciate more deeply what I’ve created.

Perhaps with scarcity, I can forgive the imperfections and appreciate what I’ve got instead of tossing it aside to make more until it’s perfect.

You know, I think I might have talked myself round on this one. I’ve just looked over to my little tapestry with fondness, rather than a critical eye. How about that.

Offering spinning courses one day

The other lesson to come out of this is that I think spinning and perhaps dyeing are good projects for Touchwood in the longer term. My city slicker friend Steph was here a couple of weeks ago and she eagerly gave spinning a go. It seemed to be fun and relaxing even in just a short space of time. So I’d like to see us offer these courses at our eco lodge one day.

Final Coming Storm project: crazy pillow

I’ve still got more yarn:

"Sky" and "Grass" yarns handspun

It’s another good Power Off activity, so I think I’ll knit up a pillow I’ve long been meaning to do with the last of the yarn:

I'll try this in Sky on one side, Grass on the other.

As Clark W. Griswold said, “I did it.” Time for tea.

I felt restless, cranky, worried in that intangible way that happens when I have too many things in my head and doubts that I’ll ever manage to get them all done.

When I get like this, Malcolm and I sit down for a cup of tea and I tell him all the things troubling me. As we learned from our Strengthsfinder results, one of Malcolm’s biggest strength is strategic thinking — in his case, he’s particularly good at looking at all the details of a situation, all the compicating factors, and determining a path ahead.

I think it’s his training as a mountain guide and navigator, where, when setting out for a hike in the outdoors with a group, he takes into account a million factors ranging from impending clouds and wind direction to the fitness levels and health conditions of the people he’s leading. He has to decide the direction he’s going to take and reassure all the people that everything’s fine.

That kind of skill comes in real handy for someone like me who tends to want everything perfect and therefore is overwhelmed when there are too many factors for me to cope with.

So, what did he suggest?

First off, a To Do list.

It sounds so unappealing doesn’t it? So tedious, so draw-within-the-lines.

But the act of grabbing two scraps of paper and a big blue marker and just writing down every single thing nagging at me, from finishing my income tax to dropping off the recycling on the morning bus run tomorrow, left my head clearer, my spirits a little less oppressed.

So now our To Do list is hanging next to the calendar, ready for us to cross items off as we go.

But that wasn’t quite enough, so the second thing I did was do some housecleaning.

Wow, To Do lists and housecleaning.

I’m really inspiring you, aren’t I? But again, picking a small task like vacuuming the living room gives me a sense of control in a world full of chaos. It’s a manageable task I can cross of my list and I can feel like I’m achieving something. It also makes the space more relaxing and pleasant to be in.

Invariably, one task leads to another and I found myself stringing washing on the line in the sunshine, an activity that always makes me feel quaintly back in time as if I’m living on the frontier alongside my ancestors.

Oddly enjoyable, hanging the laundry out to dry

Something about pegging up the clothes as the wind snaps the edges and straightens out the wrinkles, the birds fly overhead and the sun sneaks past the hulk of the house, and I feel a sense of something much more fulfilling than just doing a chore.

Job done and satisfaction restored

Finally, after all that palaver is done, I can drop onto my bed, soak in the sunshine streaming in the windows, and relax with a cup of apple tea to the BBC coverage of the Winter Olympics.

Hm, To Do lists and a quick clean — the oddest, smallest things can make the nicest difference.

I’m thinking about the often delightful responsibility of being a dreamer, a storyteller, and how you tell a story that’s both honest and worth telling.

A good story starts with the improbable or downright impossible

I think you start with attempting the impossible, which is why the quote above, which I discovered courtesy of Willy Wonka, keeps going through my mind. Here, take a look:

Isn’t it glorious?

The line is actually taken from a poem called “Ode” in a collection called Music and Moonlight — two of my favourite things and apropos since two nights ago we took advantage of a dusting of snow and bright full moon to go outside and waltz.

Impossible thing #1: Malcolm dancing

Dancing of any kind, much less the waltz, would probably have been on Malcolm’s list of impossible things to do up until recently. Even at our wedding, he refused to dance. But he’s always felt bad about that, so last Christmas my present was his promise to learn how.

We went to a few lessons of Scottish country dancing because that’s the closest thing we could find, but it still wasn’t quite what we were wanting.

Then the other night we were talking about it again and I finally thought to check YouTube, where I found a “Learn How to Waltz” video to teach us the basics. We then spent a goofy few minutes box-stepping our way around our kitchen.

We both felt so dizzy from turning around that we didn’t quite see how we’d be able to continue until I did some more Google searching (god I love research) and found you can avoid dizziness by looking at a fixed point in the distance.

So the other night we seized our chance and stepped out onto our gravel drive coated in a lovely couple of inches of snow.

The moon was full, the sky clear, and the light shone so brightly. I hummed off tuned-ly “Buffalo gals won’t you come out tonight…and dance by the light of the moon.”

I didn’t think to take a picture, and in searching around for a photo to best capture what it looked like and felt like, I found this one:

We too could hear the waves lapping on the beach, and while we aren’t actually Victorians, we felt like ones. Our house is the only one for maybe 1/2 mile around, and since we’re perched by the sea, half the view is ocean. That meant that once we stepped outside, the only illumination was moonlight.

But it was so bright you could almost pretend it was daytime, and I saw why there have been so many songs, poems, stories set to moonlight. With the snow reflecting the light, we could easily see our way through the steps and I felt a sense of timelessness and adventure.

Now before this gets too sappy, let me also say we looked a bit like those awkward teens at a school dance, less-than-gracefully shuffling our way through the “one, two, three, one, two three”s. Plus we couldn’t look at each other or else we’d get dizzy.

The point is, Malcolm put aside his self-consciousness about dancing and I put aside my lazy inclination to stay inside by the fire and we ventured forth into the improbable.

Result: a good story worth telling ourselves over the years.

The humble impossible

Doing the impossible or even improbable doesn’t have to be epic. It can be small, humble, silly. It’s a path to creating your own magical story, one you’ll enjoy telling yourself years down the line.

Now how to end this post? I asked Malcolm, and his answer was “by eating some soup.” OK then.

I’d write on the blog about what I’m thinking about with Touchwood and life. I’d share this North Star stuff, the ever-changing plans and dreams, different projects I’m working on.

The above sentences are from my notebook as part of an exercise from the book Finding Your Own North Star: Claiming the life you were meant to live. There are a series of sentences along the lines of “If I were sure I’d succeed, I’d…” and “If I had the nerve, I’d…”.

So I dutifully wrote down my answers only to reach the end of the exercise where the author, Martha Beck, says:

Now I’d like you to choose one of your answers that is neither illegal nor physically dangerous and do it. Right now, before you’re sure that it’s fail-safe, or acceptable, or risk-free. When you’re finished with that item, pick another one, and do that one too. Yes, I know you’ll be breaking the Rules. I don’t care. The needs for certainty and permission are electric fences in your mind. Which would be worse: whizzing all over them or permanently forfeiting all of the things you wrote on the list above?

What? I have to actually do what I just wrote?

So here I am, writing, a part of me convinced that no one’s reading this anyway because it’s so self-indulgent. So New Agey.

But then I think “Hey, it’s the New Year, 2010, and it’s the time to do things that scare us.”

The thing is, I do think we’re doing a lot of exciting things with Touchwood and in our day-to-day lives (which is really one and the same), but I always feel I need to get it close to perfect, tidied up enough so that it will make sense and be appreciated by you, the reader.

I imagine you wouldn’t really be interested in our ideas and projects until I can figure out how to make them more accessible, more usable and relevant to you. I mean, ideas are one thing, but it’s the actual doing of it that’s the real value, right?

Because we’ve got enough people just talking about their lives, and I wouldn’t want to bore people by droning on about ours. So I’ve stuck with tutorials or helpful articles, things I think you might want to hear about.

Problem with that is, it requires so much work to do them you don’t often ever get to see them, and I’m starting to think perhaps I need to be less perfect and just do it. Maybe sharing some of our ideas without everything else might be interesting too.

Latest work-in-progress: Make your own boot liners

For example, I’m working on designing and sewing up my own wellie boot liners to keep my feet toasty and dry:

While I’m excited about sharing that with you, I feel like I need to do a whole bunch of things first before I can write about it here. Things like:

• testing them out in different conditions to see how the design holds up and whether it should be reworked
• drawing the pattern (currently fashioned out of plastic shopping bags) in Photoshop so it’s perfect and you’ll be able to print it out at home
• figuring out how to size it down or up so you can adjust it to your foot size
• finding all the links to the sites you’ll need to get supplies, both for the UK and the US
• taking photos of all the stages of construction
• writing clear, easy-to-follow instructions and testing them out

So uh, that’s a lot to do before I can write about it.

The problem is, aside from the amount of work involved, once I’ve done all that I’m kind of bored with the project and ready to move on to something else. So while we actually do quite a few projects, we don’t tell you about most of them because we’ve already moved on.

Which brings me back to this little North Star exercise.

Sharing the less than perfect stuff

I’m going to take a gamble and start writing about the projects in progress, rather that waiting until they’re good enough to feel I can tell you about them.  I hope it’s of value to you, either as something you can then do yourself or as entertainment.

And while I’m at it, I’d like to share not just the DIY projects, but some of our thoughts and more abstract ideas too in the hopes that they help or inspire you — at least in the “I thought I was the only one!” kind of way. We’re pretty ace at doing things the odd way, the kooky way, so if you feel like a dork or outcast, don’t. Because we know just what you mean and applaud you.

All the little but shrill voices of fear

It’s scary to do this because I just keep imagining all these people rolling their eyes, thinking how we’re such dreamers, that we’re not actually practical or achieving anything, all we do is talk about things and kind of half-assed do them. They whisper derision, masquerading as “But I’m just trying to be practical/helpful/realistic.”

Well, my answer is I am a dreamer and a thinker, but I’m also a doer. I’m less good at the doing maybe, and I’m definitely not the detail-oriented person who dots the is and crosses the ts, but I do get enough done and that’s just going to have to suffice.

Someday I hope to find those detailed, see-the-thing-through-right people because I know we need them in the long run to make Touchwood work. But in the meantime we’re just getting on with what we can do.

Let’s see, another little voice of fear I can hear in my head warns me that people reading this will think how they’d do it way better than that, that I’m so foolish, so ignorant for thinking my way could ever work.

OK, well if anyone out there reads about a project we’re doing and thinks they can do it better, I hope they’ll let us know. I like ideas for improvement.

The last little voice says that this all sounds suspiciously like self-help, all very American, and all I can say in reply is, “Then don’t read it.” You probably won’t have read this far in this post anyway, but for the benefit of my self-doubt, I’d say that personal development is basically the pursuit of happiness and what better goal than that? What could possibly be more important than understanding yourself, what a fulfilling life means to you, and what you have to offer the world? If you think thinking about stuff like that is a waste of time, then you won’t be interested in what we’re doing anyway.

So on to the positive. I’ll write for those of you out there who are interested in what makes for a happy, fulfilled life. Who find making things yourself, especially out of things you’ve already got or that are inexpensive or easy to get, a lot of fun.

I’ll write to those of you who see clearly the threats to a good life, to our environment through the endless buying of stuff and the pressure to always work harder, and believe that the best way to deal with that is to follow what makes you happy, cultivate adaptability and learn how to do things that matter.

Creating the tribe

Seth Godin says in his book Tribes that we should all be leaders, we should stop catering to the masses and focus instead on finding our tribe and leading from our own unique perspective. We should stop trying to fit in and should embrace standing out because, no matter how bizarre or far out you are, there are others out there like you. And they’re waiting to hear from others like them.

Like Star Trek fans who live in uniform 24/7, or people who spin yarn out of their pets’ hair.

Or maybe a couple who live on a remote island and like to go without electricity once a month, don’t have a car, live on £12,000 a year, and who spend hours every single day just talking to each other.

I’ll do my best then to share with you our ideas as well as our little projects that make life more interesting, fun or comfortable. I’ll talk about where we are with Touchwood, how it’s continually evolving, what we’re learning — because it’s a lot, and it’s exciting. To us, anyway and hopefully to you too.

I’ll be writing to our very own tribe because I believe we have much ahead of us to do and now is the time to start doing it.

,

Since the Power Off Weekend is just around the corner, here are 101 things to do with your friends and loved ones — all without electricity:

The wonderful game of French Cricket, as shown in this picture by William Linford

101 electricity-free games and activities

Note: Not familiar with any game? Get in touch with me and I’ll help you out.

1. science experiments, flames, and safety
2. card games
3. reading books or plays out loud
4. ghost stories
5. board games, many you can also make yourself, like othello!
6. darts
7. shove h’penny
8. hang man
9. moving around the house without touching the floor (pretending the floor is the ocean)
10. shadow puppets
11. christmas card writing
12. origami
13. ten pin bowling with old water bottles as pins
14. hunt the thimble
15. hide and seek
16. model making
17. knitting and felting
18. art, picture drawing, painting
19. clay working or plasticine
20. making christmas decorations
21. writing letters to forgotten family
22. bingo
23. keeping a diary of the weekend
24. hop scotch
25. knots
26. rope making
27. kitchen science and cookery
28. three-legged race, sack race or egg & spoon race
29. music
30. dress up
31. magic tricks
32. making false teeth out of orange peel,
33. pass the parcel,
34. musical chairs,
35. paper games such as connect 4, battleships, connect the dots, etc
36. rock-paper-scissors
37. building structures with objects like cardboard egg boxes and tin cans, such as the tallest tower or the largest bridge span,
38. paper aeroplane competition
39. elastic band powered vehicles
40. morse code and secret messages
41. photography
42. claymation
43. tidying and cleaning and polishing
44. chinese whispers
45. quoit or hoopla or horseshoes
46. skipping rope
47. football
48. juggling and catch
49. kite making and flying
50. beachcombing
51. stilt walking (even on tin cans and string)
52. making toast, s’mores or toasting marshmallows on a real fire
53. nature walk
54. pin hole box camera
55. jigsaw puzzles
56. indoor basketball
57. brass polishing
58. bicycle repair
59. potato printing
60. charades
61. quizes
62. coconut shy (see bowling above)
63. pick-up sticks
64. i spy
65. radio, battery or wind up
66. simon says
67. paper trails and scavenger hunt
68. treasure hunt
69. 20 questions, animal, vegetable, miracle
70. obstacle course
71. eating together and conversation
72. a walk in the dark
73. star gazing
74. blind man’s bluff
75. hula hoop
76. tent indoors with sheets
77. piggy in the middle
78. foursquare
79. mini table tennis
80. french cricket
81. boule
82. jacks and marbles
83. carol singing
84. pin the tail on the donkey
85. make popcorn
86. spin the bottle
87. balloons
88. homemade jenga
89. feely box
90. blind tasting or scent testing
91. indoor golf putting
92. newspaper construction
93. quick on the draw / pictionary
94. three draw – word, picture, word
95. dominoes
96. house of cards
97. mini tug o’ war
98. memory game
99. diy and using tools
100. story or poetry or cartoon writing
101. fishing indoors
102. Jack’s alive
103. bobbing for apples
104. crosswords and word puzzles
105. wildlife safari / snail hunt

Here is also a great website I found:

http://www.familyeducation.com/home/

Most of the games here you can make yourself, which adds to the fun:

http://www.nickys-nursery.co.uk/seeds/pages/garden-games3.htm

Ha. I assure you, I’m far too lazy to make all these changes for some distant noble cause. Nope, I’m doing it first and foremost because I’m enjoying myself, a point which a little adventure reminded me of recently. I’ll call it “The Tale of the MacGyvered Christmas Gift.”

MacGyver to the rescue

Like the hero of the 80s show MacGyver, about a peace-loving secret agent who inevitably saves the day with his Swiss Army knife, a metal tube, and a piece of gum, I was in a sticky situation with only a few bits and pieces to rescue me.

My problem was Christmas.

The Christmas challenge

Since Malcolm is the youngest of five, we’ve got a lot of presents to make, what with nieces and grandparents and stepparents and three continents to worry about. We’ll be with my in-laws down in England for the holiday, and I’ll be honest: I’m feeling under pressure to come up with presents that won’t embarrass me or break the bank.

If it was my family, they’d like anything I came up with, under the motto of “It’s the thought that counts.” But with in-laws, as wonderful as they are, there’s still that anxiety over whether it will be good enough, whether they’ll actually like what you’ve done or just wished you’d given them a gift certificate instead.

Oh and did I mention we’ve got a budget of £20 for all the presents? Yes, £20 for about 20 presents. A year ago I would have said it was impossible. But I’ve learned a lot of tricks since then.

Putting the plan of action together

My first essential tool for the mission: a ball of yarn I’d gotten secondhand for free.

Treasure #1: free yarn

Thanks to learning how to knit two years ago, I knew I could make something with it and knock off at least one gift.

Next stop: Ravelry, a website for knitters, where I found a free pattern for a cowl scarf. But then I realised I only had one needle that was the right size. In the past I would have just bought a new pair like these, which would have set me back £15.

Beautiful but expensive knitting needls

But forking over £15 isn’t an option, so what to do?

Hm, could I make my own? A quick Google search and indeed, I can.

Going that frugal step further, instead of buying wooden dowels I scrounged around Malcolm’s woodpile that he uses to teach firemaking and stripped a stick with a knife. Then I sanded it smooth with an old bit of sandpaper lying in the garage. Perfect. Pretty as the bought ones and I can make multiple ones, saving myself £15 every time.

Onto the scarf. Encouraged by my success, I curled up in the kitchen next to the Aga stove, chatted with Malcolm, listened to the audiobook of Made to Stick and peacefully knitted. For an hour I just enjoyed the play of colour as it popped into view with each stitch and lost all track of time.

But then, whoops. I looked down at my tiny ball of yarn, annoyed because I didn’t have enough left to finish the project. I’d end up with half a scarf at this rate.

Now if money were no object, I’d just hop online and buy some more. £5 a ball and away I’d go. Instead, here was another opportunity to MacGyver a fix. Mulling it over with a cup of peppermint tea, I remembered some cream coloured yarn about the right size that’s hiding in the attic.

Raspberry swirl

Put em together and lo, there were stripes.

After another couple hours of happy knitting, I ended up with a snuggly, tasty raspberry and cream scarf, ready to be wrapped for Christmas. First part of the mission accomplished.

The scarf and handmade knitting needles

Knitting may not be your thing, but it’s the challenge that makes life fun. It’s finding a solution to each problem I encountered that excited me more than a trip to the mall or a spree on eBay could ever do.

It’s not all sunshine and roses

Lest all this happiness start to annoy you however, I assure you I do get cranky. Learning new stuff means you’re a bit of a loser at first. You’re a novice, and that means you often look like a dork.

It’s like this new bicycled experiment we’re on. I don’t ride much, I’m not in shape. When we were cycling into Stromness the other day for the first time ever, you should have heard me swearing as I huffed and puffed the 5 miles into town.

Legs on fire, lungs heaving after 2 miles. Then we hit a headwind and I kid you not, I had to switch to my very lowest gear of my 21 speed bike and we were on flat ground. I wasn’t peddling uphill, I was simply trying to move forward on a flat road, and you could have walked faster than I was going.

That's about what it felt like

Cars zipped by and I pictured the drivers looking on, amused at or worse — pitying my slow, slow wobble forward. I imagined lean lycra-clad cyclists whizzing past to leave me in the dust, contempuous of my snail’s pace.

Still I kept on cycling, pushing one foot then the other, finally resorting to counting each revolution to keep me going. Twenty-four, twenty-five...Get to 100 and start again.

I saw Malcolm up ahead, valiantly cycling as slowly as he possibly could, clearly having little trouble but doing his best to hide it. Humiliating.

But then we crested the hill into town and I saw I was home free. A nice long road downhill, coasting into town. I had done it. And I felt really, really proud of myself. Like I had run a marathon or birthed a child.

I figured the next morning I’d be dying, but I was surprisingly okay. Even weirder, I wanted to do it again.

It’s never the right time

That’s been my experience of doing new things so far. At first you think you could never do it, or that it’s just not the right time. You’ll do it when the kids have left the house, when you get the next raise, when you can afford to, when you know exactly what to do.

You couldn’t possibly make your own Christmas presents! You don’t have the time, you’re not artistic, no one will like what you make anyway.

Channeling your inner McGuyver

But then you start. You’re awkward, like I was riding the bike. You run out of resources, like I did knitting. But then you adapt and you keep going. You get wiley, you devise a cunning plan.

You start doing it and you focus sharpens. Time disappears. You forget to snack or complain or feel bored because you’re too busy doing your thing.

Then the best part: you succeed! You make the top of the hill or finish the scarf and you’ve done it. You’ve won, using your wits and your determination. You’ve done what they said couldn’t be done and won.

That’s the kind of happiness I’m talking about. It’s saying you want to do something, thinking it seems impossible, and then doing it anyway.

It’s enjoying setting challenges for yourself and succeeding at it. Saving the planet is just one more challenge that each of us can take on and have a great time overcoming with creativity and an easy laugh.

When we’re our own personal McGuyvers, we get to save the day on a regular basis — and have more fun than any 80s action star ever did.

What Would Your Own MacGyver Do?

What are your MacGvyered projects?

What challenge have you faced lately that required some MacGyver ingenuity? Have you made something out of stuff you had lying around that solves a problem? I’d love to hear your stories, so please share them here.

Update: Inspired by Darcy’s and Kerrilee’s hula hoop and fly swatter MacGyvered projects, I’ve added a new feature below that will let you upload pictures of your projects so we all can get some good ideas on how to tackle everyday challenges.

Just click on the Add Photo button and upload a picture of your project!

Add Photo

Select an image to upload:	Browse for file  Enter URL Import Image by URL
Caption:

Toggle ratings

Another Christmas present: Bag from old sweater   the Flyswatter 3000: a wooden spoon, paper bag, and twisty tie.

Bring on the circus bikes!

Going car-free in a rural location

Unlike when I lived in Washington DC you didn’t really need a car, not having one on Orkney is highly unusual. Pretty much everyone drives.

There are practical reasons for this: we have sporadic public transport, much of our housing is spread far and wide, and our weather can put even the hardiest person to the test.

But this isn’t the whole story.

Car = freedom

Having a car is also an emotional thing, a sign of independence. It’s even a little bit wrapped up in who we think we are.

For me, our car represents our dream of moving to Orkney and starting our own business. We bought our trusty Fiat Doblo 4 years ago in Perth when we decided to relocate to this island and start a new life.

Malcolm and our new car, moving to Orkney in 2004

Malcolm’s used it since then to run his tours with Five Senses, connecting visitors to Orkney in a new way. We’ve met so many good people through this and we’ve relied on the money it’s provided.

Car = home

I think it’s also been a security blanket, this idea that even if we didn’t have a house, we could always throw our stuff in the car and have a place to call home.

So giving up the car is saying goodbye to a lot of things, a lifestyle and identity that we’ve had for four years. It’s changing Five Senses as a business, dropping the car tours and either doing more of the bushcraft and outdoor skills, or well, who knows?

Finally, ditching the car is also a practical challenge, because what we’ve decided to replace our car with, at least for now, are bicycles.

Bicycles, really?

I’m not a big fan of bicycling culture. That whole spandex, toe clips and space age helmets thing puts me off.

Then there’s the wind. In the summer, we average around 15mph wind most of the time. In the winter, it can easily go up to 40-50mph, with a nice lashing of rain.

Since we’re briskly heading into winter, I can look forward to a 9am sunrise and 3:30pm sunset in January.

Huffing and puffing

Lastly, I’m totally out of shape. It’s a good day when I take a gentle walk on the beach for 15 minutes, so cycling for a few hours into Kirkwall…hm.

I need to exercise more, but I know myself. If I have the lazy alternative, I’ll take it. So while it’s nice to think I’d go on more walks and bike rides with proper motivation, the reality is I’m not doing that if I can drive instead.

I’m just going to have to give it a go and hope for the best.

Why this? Why now?

After all this moaning about how hard it’s going to be, you may be wondering why we’re bothering. Two big reasons: Age of Stupid and Office Space.

Age of Stupid basically asks us the question from 50 years in the future when the planet is ruined: Why didn’t we do enough about climate change?

The Age of Stupid USA Trailer from Age of Stupid on Vimeo.

Malcolm and I watched the film a few weeks ago and even though we’d seen films like An Inconvenient Truth, it was this one that tipped the balance and we both said “Enough already! Let’s do this.”

So we’re going on an experiment to reduce our carbon footprint to one tonne between the both of us, from 22 tonnes the average British couple consumes now.

We’ll be writing much more on this subject as part of our work with 10:10 — a movement that asks us to commit to reducing our carbon footprint by 10% in 2010. I hope to see you there.

Humans weren’t meant to be in cubicles

The other reason is best summed up by Office Space, which I often quote, where our hero works a meaningless, soul-destroying job in an office writing code for a big, meaningless corporation. Here’s one of my favourite scenes where Peter, the hero, explains to his work colleague what he’s realised about their crappy jobs:
[kaltura-widget wid="vy84pda9ip" width="410" height="364" addpermission="3" editpermission="3" /]
I remember those days all too clearly, and I never, never want to have to go back to that again.

With our still doing Touchwood Project as volunteers, we have to either reduce our spending or make more money. Until we can get sufficient funding, the only viable income options for us here are jobs like working for the Council or one of the grocery stores.

Selling the car is far preferable to either of those options for me, and it will give us living expenses for another few months, by which time we’ll hopefully have gotten our funding.

Other car-free options

Hitchhiking and car sharing are two alternatives we’d like to develop further. We’ve written a bit about this already, and will be doing much more in the coming months.

A third option I’m pretty excited about are electric scooters.

Xero's eScooter Classic

Ooo, prrrretty.

There are several models newly on the market, but I’m all about fun design, so I prefer a retro-styled model. Xero’s eScooter Classic gets from 50 miles in a single charge, goes up to 30 mph, and is reasonably priced at £1500 ($2500).

This option is well worth a fuller post on its own, so I’ll write that one soon. However, since one of the main reasons we’re selling the car is to save money, forking over £1700 or so for the scooter and gear isn’t what we want to do just yet.

As I wrote in an earlier post, I love the idea of quadricycles but at a whopping €3450/£3000, they’re even more expensive than a scooter, so it’s just going to have to wait.

It’s gotta be stylish and fun

Nope, if I’m going to do bicycling, it’s going to be fun and it’s going to be stylish. Happily, there’s a whole movement here, best seen in the Tweed Runs, cycling events where everyone dresses in my favourite fabric, tweed!

There’s just so much to talk about but I think I’ve run on long enough for now.

Malcolm’s just left the house to hitchhike and walk the 5 miles into Stromness to do our shopping. It’s cold, raining, but he left in high spirits — just about bounced out the door — because he sees it as an adventure, a chance to meet people and do a little, humble planet-saving. Me too.