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| A family holiday to the hop fields of Kent. Below, a modern family holiday. |
This last week a
personal stroke of good fortune led me to book our first proper
family holiday in five years. Yes, we finally seem to have sold the
'unsellable' farmhouse in Spain and I had promised the family that,
should this ever occur, we would all go on a holiday somewhere.
Of couse, me being me,
I couldn't let that just be an excuse to lie on a beach for a couple
of weeks – that would just be cheating – so instead this summer we'll be
staying on an organic farm on a Greek island and will help protect the eggs of endangered loggerhead turtles on a nearby beach. The farm is run by
'returnees' – who had previously had good jobs in offices, probably
in Athens, before TSHTF, so it will at least be interesting to talk
to them and get a little first hand reportage from Greece (two days
in Athens at the start should allow for that).
I'm not sure if people
who have knowledge of peak oil should be allowed to go on aeroplanes,
and in my defence, I hardly ever do. My normal mode of transport is a
bicycle or the feet that four billion years of evolution have given
me. But still, please don't expect a grovelling apology as I fully
intend to continue using some fossil fuels on the Long Descent,
whilst at the same time using my time and energy learning and
preparing to live with a lot less of them.
'You're going where?'
asked a relative in horror when informed of said holiday. The
implication being, of course, that Greece is some kind of warzone and
that we'll likley be taken prisoner and sold into slavery for hard
currency. I doubt that will happen, but if it does you can be sure
that I'll be blogging about it.
Anyway, on a related
note, I was flicking through an old copy of the literary magazine
Granta the other day and I came across a series of pictures of the
Kent hop pickers of yesteryear. Until about the 1950s it was common
for thousands of people from the poorer districts of London to go on
a family holiday every summer in the hop fields of Kent, south of the
capital. Most of them walked there, spending up to two months at a
time working quite hard every day beneath the summer sun. Kids joined
in too and, for the men, it was a chance to escape the grim and
dangerous conditions on the docks or in the factories where they worked.
The practice persisted
for many years, and in many counties a similar thing still exists
(the most notable example I can think of is the great walnut forests
of Kazakhstan which fill with families every summer and which the
late Roger Deakin wrote about so wonderfully in his book Wildwood:a Journey through Trees) but was killed off by the arrival of the
welfare state which negated the need for those on low incomes to earn
extra money to pay their rents. Of course, it wasn't all work. There
was a great knees-up most evenings (they were, of course, involved in
the production of beer) and the opportunity to live in the open countryside for
a few weeks of each year with a bunch of friends and relatives must have been highly anticipated.
I remember my own
grandparents telling me about their family holidays. They set off
from Manchester, en famille, on bicycles, arriving at the
coast some days later. This was considered normal back then when the
aeroplane's main purpose was to drop bombs on your enemy and the only
people who took to the skies in them often didn't come back again.
I know quite a lot
about my ancestors from the last few centuries because my sister is a
genealogist and has traced them quite far back (although not
all the way to the Viking settlers who named a Yorkshire village
Hybden's Dale (which meant Rosehip Valley in Old Norse,
as it still does in modern Danish) which was later anglicised to
Heptonstall, and then misspelled Heppenstall). I know, for instance, that most
of them lived in and around Sheffield and one of the most common
professions, if you could call it that, was 'stone picker'. These
people went around literally picking up stones from fields and
transported them to wherever railway lines were being built where
they would be used as bedding for the tracks. It's a bit of stretch to
say that my family built the world's first railway system, but we
certainly did our bit.
This gave me pause for
thought about how things have changed – and the likely direction
they will take again in the future if and when cheap fossil fuel
powered transportation reverts to its default position of
unobtainable. Will my great-grandchildren one starry night in the future be sitting
around a camp fire in a Scottish vineyard and telling stories about
how their ancestors once flew around the world in giant ships with
wings?
When this thought
seized me I couldn't resist the idea of making a little photo series
at the top of this blog post showing a past family holiday (the hop
pickers), a current family holiday (a consumer class family in a
concrete resort staffed by resentful underpaid locals on a tropical
island) and then a future one ... But try as I might I couldn't find
an image for the last one as all available images relating to
families of the future have us decked out in skin tight costumes and
hopping onto spaceships for a few days on Mars.
So I'm afraid we'll
just have to imagine how a family holiday will look like – if such
a thing exists – 50 years from now when we all tumble chaotically
down the rough side of Hubbert's Peak.
Here's a thought for
the week that fits in with my Greek holiday theme but which I couldn't be
bothered to insert into the prose in a convincing manner: Like
Icarus, we are certainly flying too close to the sun and the wax
holding the feathers in place is melting quickly, if only we had the
eyes to see it.
In the same edition of
Granta I read a story by Doris Lessing entitled Death of a Chair.
This tells the tale of an old chair bought at auction for pennies in
the 1960s and its eventual destruction by Lessing with a saw some 40
years later. It's as poignant a story as you're likely to find about
the loss of craftmanship over the years and its replacement with
cheap mass-produced junk. Only at the end, when she strips back the
layers of fabric and the saw bites into the wooden frame does she
realise what an act of vandalism she is involved in, although by that
point the chair has been ruined.
When I'd finished reading it I
quickly showed it to my wife, in the hope thet she would become inspired to return to what she is trained to do. She
is a qualified old-style upholsterer who can take an ancient smashed
up sofa, strip it down to the frame and build it up again into a top
quality restored piece of furniture that should be good for another
century of use.
She learned these
skills in England, completing a City and Guilds course in upholstery
and furniture restoration, despite being the youngest in the class by
forty years or so. Since she finished it ten years ago she has been told
repeatedly that there is 'no use' for her skills and she eventually
conceded that 99% of people would rather shop in Ikea than pay for
craftmaship. So now we have a huge amount of tools and materials in
storage – everything from wooden trestles and different kinds of
tack hammers, to huge bags of horse hair, webbing and resuscitated fabric – just waiting for the day when the logic will turn and
people will once again want to pay a flesh and blood person a reasonable sum to
do a decent job. In the meantime she is working as a cleaner for the
local council, cleaning up after old people in care homes and
listening to their stories of how things have changed over the years.
I'm not sure how long
we will be waiting ...
