4~The Bios

We are in the midst of Life. Life forms teem and wriggle and sprout around us, intent on flourishing in the heavenly habitats and microcosms we engineer in our homes and gardens. Moulds, blooms, dry rots, woodworm, rodents, wasp nests ; all seek out and thrive on our unconscious bounty.

3~In the Beginning 1

I've only been in this valley in North Pembrokeshire for about fifteen years, but it's felt like another lifetime. Like a reward for Effort, a consolation gift for Trying, a gentle introduction after my solitary and headstrong  projects, to a place where Things Happened.

Where the land had Soul, where Nature Spirits were vocal, and apparent, and where people shared a deep unspoken purpose.

One of these maxims was to live as lightly and respectfully as possible upon the Earth, and one expression of this was to make living spaces that encouraged a sharing of the Earths moods and seasons.

I arrived here in the middle of a story, but at what turned out to be, the beginning of another chapter. 

The first part had been to do with the discovery by the National Park of an illegal roundhouse, spotted whilst a plane was searching for furtively sited caravans. On further investigation, a number of other planning infringements, including a domed living space, were found near the farmhouse, Brithdir Mawr, that was the home of a community, initiated by Emma and Julian Orbach.

Emma had been living in a tipi on one of the lower fields when all this happened, so quickly took her tipi down, and with Tony and Faith's help, put up a small straw bale hut, on a deck of pallets, just inside the woods. 

A new chapter had begun...

When I met Emma, she had three huts, a big, middle sized, and original, little hut. I suppose that's where my coinage of the term 'goldilocks' for my present day huts derives from..

We came to live in her middle hut, the other two being lent out occasionally.

It was on a raised wooden platform, with strawbale, pegged walls, two windows, a doorway facing East, a sloping reciprocal frame roof, made of ash poles and hazel struts, insulated with straw, and covered in rubber pondliner that also clad a wide overhang, that accommodated a kitchen space and storage. It held a metal open stove box, with a clay liner chimney stack, for heat and cooking, some boxes and shelves, and a roll up sheep wool mattress bed, that served as a back rest in the day. It was lit by candlelight.

The straw bales were plastered with a mixture of clay and horse manure, which deterred them for the most part from becoming the homes of rats or mice.

This was a new chapter, for me, as I had made a major life change by coming to 'live with a wood-witch' as my sister proclaimed, and for us both, as the Parks enforcement officer had discovered the huts, and so proceedings to remove them were underway... 

2~Just Right

My first modular hut worked well. I'd had a load of larch planks and 4x2s delivered, and from it made a twelve sided hut. Each wall was about 32inches wide, and about half held windows. I'd put up a partition that reached the centre, where I was to put in a stove. I made the floor from a sectional frame, onto which I screwed plywood.
It all happened with a silent certainty that I can only explain as inspiration. I had none of my usual  jabbering, squabbling internal dialogue going on.
And yet the outcome was perfect.I thought it so..
 I called it the Goldilocks Hut.
It was just right.

There is a divine principle in good design. An Origami.
An unfolding of a natural, organic form, and then a refolding it into a thing that we want...
This can happen in the cleaving of the life-laid strata, of tree rings, and in the riving of sedimentary rock.
We can show respect for the trees usual form too, by reflecting its likely yield in our cutting list. We can choose a girth of tree that the forest wants to give us.
We can cut a length of log that can be taken from the forest with the least possible impact on the soil, and the remaining trees..
The structure we make can reflect within it that length put to good use.

This should be blindingly obvious in our practices, but woefully, it's not. Instead, a common solution is to render much of the smaller timber and slab to flake or chip or dust, then reconstitute it into slabs and boards. I find there is a deadweight to such pulverised materials that feels like the original tree or rocks resentment...
I'm ambivalent about plywood mind... It is produced by flensing a tree into thin sheets, that do reflect the trees form, then relayering these sheets with glue. Plywood occasionally gives me a toxic splinter, which might reflect it's revenge...
Ambivalent too about reconstituted cork oak as insulation slabs. I love that it's from a renewable source, and keeps its integrity of structure even when it's been wet though..

But the path to total consistency is, like the dutiful obedience to the normal practice, all too often, the road to righteousness, and that's not a place I ever wanted to go either. Even now, with online global communities dedicated to mutual enablement, priesthoods, traditions, and new norms all to easily take root.

 I always found the consistency of such folk somehow suspect, and mechanical
 as life, and design and solution, are all worth far more than that.

1~Back in the Huts!

I don't know when men decided that Permanence was a Good Thing.
I think that I suspect Farming, and the investment of unceasing effort, and the perennial yearning for certainty that it nurtured. The acquisition of stored crops promoted rodent-proofing, and led to the stronghold, a safeguard against pillage.
Impermanence became regarded as inferior, vagrant,somewhat disreputable.

Surely this was a falsehood in its time, and is actually toxic now, in a world where the sheer weight and bulk of our appendages threatens to overwhelm other life forms and their habitats, and where the effort to compete in accumulations and implied status creates massive social and cultural injustice. From a society of inherited roles and material wealth (or poverty) we have had to become more mobile and fluid, changing our roles, as technology creates new opportunities, or become marginalised and redundant. We are a new race of hunter gatherers.
I coined a slogan in my youth, that I persuaded my sister to silkscreen onto teeshirts, that I then, to my surprise, actually managed to sell. It proclaimed "Back up the Trees!".
 The evolutionary recanting it suggests, I invoke again. We need to return to living in huts.

By this I mean lightweight, modest, modular structures, that leave little mark upon the land when they are moved. Affordable, so housing does not entail a massive lifetime repayment, and instead, a renewable licensed planning status, rather than our presentday permanent planning permission, that creates scarcity, and encourages housing to be seen as investment, rather than the lifehub of our communities.
These structures would be more in keeping with our fluid, ever-changing culture.


I'm not committed to how these should evolve. They can emerge using simple survivalist techniques, in backwood communities. Or they could stem from a similar, competitive race to that Google and other high tech companies have joined in developing intelligent cars. The more solutions, the merrier.

One certainty that runs through all, is that Humans seem to be good at making crises, then finding a way to fix them...