The Great Escape Part VI: Into The Firing Line

The first issue of The Olive Press

If you are still reading this - well done! You're one of the few who hasn't cut their RSS in disgust. In any case, I promise this is leading up to something that is relevant to the stated aims of this blog.

You can read the other parts by clicking on the links below:

Part I: Maladjusted
Part II: Adjusted for Inflation
Part III: Drifting

Part IV: A Merry Dance

Part V: Out of the Frying Pan

One does not simply move to Spain. In fact it took about nine months of planning and several visits roaming around Andalucía, but by September we were installed in a 500-year-old stone house in a small village perched on the side of a mountain in the most backward part of Spain’s most backward province. We also had a new baby with us, Sofia, and it got so cold in the house during the following winter that we all had to wear several sweaters and gather around the fire every evening just like people must have done for the previous half millennium.

Nobody yet had a mobile phone in the village – there was no point because there was no signal – so instead they stood on their roofs and shouted to one another. In the crisp winter air, scented by olive wood smoke, and looking around at the surrounding snow-capped peaks, I felt like I had arrived in paradise.

We had, again, been able to exploit the property bubble, and our house in Denmark being worth more than when we had bought it (largely thanks to the City deciding to build a metro station next to it and redeveloping the beach area into something that wouldn’t look out of place in Miami) – so we had some leeway to get settled. Property in Spain was cheap – not as cheap as it had been but still very cheap by northern European standards. This was especially so of crooked 500-year-old piles of stone in out-of-the-way villages where nobody spoke English.

Our plan was to live in the small village house until we could find an old ruin on a bit of viable land, which we would then build up into a liveable house and embark on a path of low impact living where we would live until the end of our days. The reasons for doing this were primarily environmental ones – I wanted to walk my talk and hop off the consumer treadmill – but I was also convinced that it would provide a good place for bringing up children, in contrast to what they would experience in rich, highly industrialised northern Europe.

I got into living in Spain like a fish slipping into water. It almost felt like a kind of homecoming and most days I had to rub my eyes to check it wasn’t all some kind of dream.  We had moved to La Alpujarra, a collection of valleys and villages between mountains just to the south of Granada and just to the north of the Tropical Coast. The region had been populated by the Islamic Moors in the 16^th century after they were expelled from Granada, and not an awful lot had changed since then (apart from the people, of course). The economy was mainly agrarian and the farmers were all small scale. Old traditions hung on – like the matanza (pig slaughtering festivals), a belief in the duende , or spirit, of flamenco – and nobody had ever heard of an iPhone.

But even in paradise, alas, one must earn a living. I was fortunate enough to be offered a job in an estate agent’s office in Orgiva, the main town. I took it. The job involved driving around the region and photographing properties and putting together a website for rentals. The boss was a louche and sleazy Englishman with a lisp and it wasn’t long before I realized he was crooked and was never going to pay me.

I quit after a month (again, never having been paid a cent). I was moaning about what a scoundrel this boss was to Mary, a young woman from Yorkshire who also worked there, and she heartily agreed. She went on to say that herself and her husband, who had taken to wandering alone in the mountains for days at a time, had planned to start a local newspaper. I said I thought it was a good idea.

One day soon after I had a day at leisure in my village and decided it would be a great idea to walk to the summit of the mountain. Mulhacen is the highest mountain in Iberia and it seemed like a good use of a day. I drove part way up and then walked the last few hours. As I was trekking across the boulder-strewn upper slopes I happened to round a summit of sorts and was able to look out for miles and miles across the southern littoral of Spain and out across the Mediterranean. What I saw shocked me because, despite it being only late Autumn the entire seaboard seemed to be covered in white snow. I squinted at it, trying to look more closely, and could make out delicate filigree patterns in the surface of the white stuff and then I suddenly realized what I was looking at.

It was a shrink-wrapped landscape, smothered in white plastic greenhouses as far as the eye could see. I had read about them, sucking up the dwindling groundwater and replacing it with pesticides and fertilizer – just to provide cheap salad to the supermarkets of northern Europe. 

I hiked further up to the summit, marvelling at the beauty around me but perturbed by what I had seen. By the time I made it down again, late in the evening, I knew what I was going to do. I was going to start a newspaper and draw attention to this landscape-eating monster which was clearly spreading towards La Alpujarra where it would no doubt consume and kill the area. I considered that it might just be a hopeless gesture, but nevertheless I wanted to do something within my power to try and stop it spreading into La Alpujarra and destroying the unique and rich biodiversity. 

Plastic greenhouses spreading across the land in Almeria, Spain

That newspaper, when it appeared, was called The Olive Press. I started it with Mary’s husband, who was eventually coaxed down from his Wordsworthian wanderings. It started off as a local community newspaper, aimed to appeal to the sizeable population of beatniks, hippies, renunciants, New Agers and general misfits who lived in the area. I thought that if we drummed up enough interest in the various environmental abuses going on in the region then it might wake up the sleepy Spaniards, who seemed to be turning a blind eye to all of it. 

We had an office, recently vacated by a lawyer who had gone missing (signs of a fight were there in the kicked in door and abandoned volumes of law), a few desks and supermarket-bought computers, a receptionist and a husky (similarly rescued from said supermarket). Mark, Mary’s husband, said he was a journalist. I didn’t have a clue but taught myself how to design a newspaper with QuarkXpress For Dummies – and we were away.

The newspaper, on its first print run, was very popular. We timed its release to coincide with the local market day and I watched, agog, as people walked around the streets reading it. I even saw Chris Stewart – the person whose book had led me to move to Spain – walking past with a copy (later, he wrote articles for it). We drove it all over the region, delivering it to every inconsequential village we could find. In short, it was a great debut. 

But the thing about newspapers is that you can never rest. Work was frenetic. I did the graphic design, acted as commissioning editor, accountant, features editor, proofreader, restaurant reviewer and distributor. Every week I went out to meet and interview interesting people who were doing interesting environmental things. I met some inspirational people and got to see a lot of Andalucia, which was like a universe in its diversity and its richness. I felt like my whole life had been building up to working in this role.

At the same time as we were working on the newspaper, my wife and I also bought an old ruined farmhouse on a hill called Cerro Negro (‘the Black Hill’) and set about making it habitable. This was to take some two years of hard work just to get comfortable and, being off grid, I had a very sharp learning curve ahead of me fitting all the solar PV, the water system, sewage system and all the other crucial systems that most of us take for granted.

If, before, I had considered I was living in paradise, now I was sure of it. On the land were numerous trees, including oranges, lemons, grapefuits, olives, pomegranates, apples, pears, peaches, figs and many, many almonds.  The land was very fertile and irrigation came from a stream which ran directly from the melting snows at the top of the mountain. Situated up a very poor unsurfaced road we never got any passing traffic and the peace was absolute.

I had found my paradise and now I would have been happy to live out the rest of my days there in rustic simplicity, living ‘away’ from civilization but being very much a part of the local community, cultivating great food and genuine friends and having all the time in the world to cherish and educate my two young daughters. I had found peace and happiness and , what’s more, I had found it at a relatively young age.

Our farmhouse and smallholding on Cerro Negro

*** Fast forward by two years ***

If, God forbid, one day I should die and go to Heaven and St Peter or someone like that is there to tell me what I did right in my life and what I did wrong (tip of the hat to Kurt Vonnegut), I’d imagine that he’d say starting The Olive Press was the one good thing I did. Without going into too many details about what was achieved (that would take an entire book which, by the way, I have actually written and is sitting on a USB stick in my drawer in case anyone is interested to read it – and, yes, I did find a publisher for it after a long search but they said ‘Take out the dull bits,’ meaning the bits about peak oil and wider environmental concerns and I said ‘Sorry, I can’t’.). 

Among its more noteworthy achievements was acting as a catalyst to stop a disastrous golf course being constructed on a UNESCO site by shadowy rich investors. The battle turned into a war of attrition, with one of the supporters on our side, hispanophile writer Alistair Boyd (aka Lord Kilmarnock) actually dying, with the stress of being hit by a 1 million euro lawsuit perhaps being a contributory factor.

The paper was also heavily involved in a scandal involving MP Margaret Moran - one of Tony Blair’s ‘babes’ and, coincidentally, a neighbour of mine-  who had been bullying our newspaper delivery man, and in the resulting conflagration she sued the paper (and lost). This turned out to be one of the first inklings of the UK parliamentary expenses scandal which was a major contributory factor in the downfall of New Labour.

In the end the whole newspaper saga was a firsthand lesson for me in the corrupting influence of money and how it can warp and muffle honest reporting. The original newspaper, as I had planned it, was too local and perhaps too radical to earn enough money to pay the staff. Thus it had to be expanded outside of its original geographical area, into regions where people were not so, well, enlightened. Sales people became involved and bigger advertisers were attracted, who naturally insisted we tone down the editorial so as not to scare the ‘clients’, and desist from putting pictures of mangled and abused animals on the cover. And from my point of view it was difficult to write an editorial about the perils of global warming when on the facing page we had placed a full page advert showing cheap fares for British Airways.

It wasn’t just the advertisers complaining. My business partner too was unhappy with the 'green' label and said he was unhappy being considered ‘a fucking tree-hugger’. Instead he wanted to take the paper more upmarket to attract a wealthier readership - abandoning the original readership in the process. Articles about expensive organic wine were okay, by this way of thinking, but not ‘far out’ ones about the local anarchist community building their own school. Given this uncomfortable state of affairs it wasn’t long before I found myself unwelcome my own office and the paper began its descent first into schizophrenic please-everyone sensationalism and then into celebrity obsessed lowest-common-denominator hackery and faux moral outrage over inconsequential matters, which is where it rests today. 

To cap it all, after all the time, effort and money I poured into it, I ended up penniless and working on a building site to make ends meet. I had to sell my stake in the newspaper and tried to put the whole thing behind me, but the legal ramifications and costs went on for month, if not years, afterwards. Later my business partner simply disappeared, leaving unpaid debts, and our names were displayed on a kind of wall-of-shame in a public place in Granada City. 

The financial crisis hit at the same moment, meaning we couldn’t sell our little village house and were left with a mortgage that needed paying every month. Our life in paradise had rapidly taken a hellish detour and my wife buckled under the financial pressure and almost suffered a nervous breakdown. Eventually she went back to Denmark with the children to try and find work. When they left I felt like an utter failure.

The paper itself was taken over by Jon Clark, a London Fleet Street journalist who had been the ‘Show business Editor’ of the Daily Mail. I got on fine with Jon, who lived in an opulent mansion at a secret address near Ronda (secret, because so many people were after him, not least the desperado family of a local serial killer he had written a book about). Jon was also the first journalist on the scene of the infamous Madeleine McCann case, in which a toddler was abducted in nearby Portugal, and has used The Olive Press as a platform for reporting suspected sightings and other developments in the case ever since. 

There were countless other battles and controversies, proving that a little paper could have a lot of bite. In the early days it was known as a campaigning newspaper, always at the centre of things and getting into trouble by confronting power. Indeed, in 2008 the newspaper was honoured with the Spanish ‘Beacon of Hope’ award for its environmental campaigning (of which there was plenty), so we must have been doing something right.

If, by now, you’re imagining me now as some kind of fearless paladin in shining armour with my trusty sword of valour and a shield of integrity, please cast aside those thoughts immediately. Think of me more as a Bilbo Baggins type character – all I wanted to do was have a fairly quiet life with a local community-based newspaper, Yes, I wanted to draw attention to the menace of the plastic greenhouses - but I had no interest in making a name for myself by taking on British MPs, Russian development consortia or murderous Spanish gangster politicians. Indeed, the fear of thugs coming round to my remote farmhouse in the middle of the night and exacting revenge on me and my family was quite a real one. No, the honour for that lies squarely with Jon Clarke, who either has large cojones or a small brain, or quite possibly a mixture of the two

I was left behind at our house without my family for some months desperately trying to earn enough money to stop our house being repossessed. Some similarly penniless friends moved in with me and brought their kids too and, although it was nice having company, it felt like I was a guest in my own home. They also brought with them chickens, goats and even a donkey.

I worked as a labourer down on the coast, mixing concrete by day and learning skills that will be useful in the future. Leon, my friend and the one I was working for, built ‘organic’ buildings, using plenty of hand moulded plaster, rocks, wood and other natural materials. He taught me that building a house is not all that difficult if you know what you are doing and are willing to spend plenty of time on it rather than going for the industrial indentikit style of building. 

Apart from my income from laboring I tried to sell the produce from the smallholding -but the prices were so low that it wasn’t even worth the petrol money to drive them to market. Thus I left thousands of the juiciest organic oranges and lemons imaginable rot on the ground. 

I did manage to sell the grapefruits, which were popular with foreigners, and I also secured a bizarre online night-time job where I was part of a global 24 hour team writing reports about real-time acts of violence around the world. These reports were then conveyed to wealthy clients who had ‘interests’ in the places where these things were happening. That’s how I learned that at every minute of every day, someone somewhere is dying in a hail of bullets or being hacked to bits with machetes – usually in out-of-the-way countries that don’t make the news but where business concerns lie.

But the money I earned wasn’t enough to pay the mortgage, and what’s more, I missed my family. It was a low point, and when my wife phoned and said she had saved some money for me to come and visit in Denmark, I jumped at the chance.

I flew there one Spring evening approaching my 37^th birthday. In the airport I picked up a copy of The Copenhagen Post, Denmark’s only newspaper in English. In it there was a job for a graphic designer to do the layout using DTP software. I had experience of this and so applied for the job, getting an interview two days hence. At the interview I was offered the job as long as I was able to start the following week. Thus I hastily got back on the plane and returned to Spain. I spent a day packing what I considered to be valuable into our tiny Renault Twingo car, borrowed 50 euros off a friend to add to my 150 euros that was all I had to my name, and set off on the three day drive to Denmark.

As I left, a storm was breaking over the mountains and, glancing back I saw a rainbow over the hillside where our house was. I had poured my life, my dreams and the rest of our money into that house, and never had considered we would leave it behind – but here I was. I vowed to return to Spain. It was a defiant vow and one I intend to keep.

I drove to Denmark at 80km/hr to save fuel and made it after three days with barely any petrol left in the tank and no money at all in my wallet. Along the way I had slept in the car and, once, at a free campsite in France and had only a loaf of heavy home-made bread to eat along the way. I was miserable the whole way, but at least I would be seeing my family again.

I did the last leg from the middle of France to Copenhagen without stopping, driving for almost 20 hours without a break and arriving in Denmark at breakfast time on a Sunday morning.  I pulled up outside my mother-in-law’s house, where my family were being put up in the spare room, and rang the doorbell. Footsteps approached the door and it opened. I was let in without a word. There would be a period of shame to pass through, that much was clear.

We were homeless and without money, our dreams shattered and our life in Spain aborted. There was no sympathy for our plight, quite the opposite, in fact, because if you dare to live your dreams you can expect to face the consequences when they go wrong. But at least I had a job and my health, and we were a family again. I sat on the bed in our shared room and hugged my kids, who were full of joy that I had returned. And then I fell into a deep sleep.

Thus began the toughest three years of my life.                   

Spain: The End of the Affair

It's funny how journalistic narratives are supposed to play out. I have just spent the last week in Spain, finally divesting myself of the small farm that was to have been my life's work but instead turned into an albatross around my neck. In theory I should be writing about how everything is broken down there, how gangs of unemployed youths roam the streets in large packs and how lampposts are amply hung with the swaying corpses of those who could take it no longer.

But if I wrote that I'd be lying. Superficially at least, Spain appears to be utterly normal, if a little quiet. In fact I don't think I have ever seen it so well presented. There is the appearance of calm, at least. The new airport in Malaga is open for business and where, before, passengers could choose between coffee and orange juice at a single fly-blown cafe run by a friendly old man, they can now choose between about a dozen or more chain cafes, and blow their euros at numerous fashion and electronics stores.

Driving from the airport in Malaga to the small town in the mountains near Granada where I was staying, one is reminded though that all is not well. The country, for a while, was running on mega-projects and one of the grandest was to build a concrete ribbon of motorway so that one could travel all the way from Cadiz on the westward Atlantic coast to Barcelona on the northern Mediterranean coast. This was no easy job as Spain is mostly mountains and the road had to carve its way through terrain that just isn't very motorway-friendly. It was one of the projects that was supposed to bring the country into the 21^st, no, 20^th century but the only problem is that it remains incomplete. You get to La Herradura and a sign says 'End of Motorway' and spits you back onto the winding coastal road that was such an embarrassment for the regional government. The hills have been blasted ready to make way for the new road but judging by the layers of dust on all the machinery arrayed there, combined with the lack of workmen, it doesn't look like that road is going to be finished any time soon.

Along the same route I drove past a hill covered in the kind of poorly-built and ugly little apartments that the country now has several million of, and looming over them was a large sign declaring '€39.000 bank liquidación'. These would probably have sold for around €100,000 only a couple of years back.

I carried on driving, arriving late at night in the village in the mountains where I used to live. The last hour of the drive I had only passed one or two cars. I was able to keep the full-beams on practically the whole time without having to dim them for approaching cars. Was I imagining it, or had it always been this quiet?

In the daylight things seemed like they were back to normal. More beautification projects had been completed and the local town of Órgiva no longer looked like the shabby one I remembered. There was a new supermarket – the first 'proper' supermarket in the whole region – along with a new municipal swimming pool, football pitch, basketball court and a fancy new open air courtyard cafe where the patrons have misted water sprayed on them to keep them cool as they sip their Alhambra lagers. Crisis – what crisis?

It was only when I began to speak to people that I got the feeling the local economy was running on fumes. A friend had taken a job at a local cafe, working for peanuts she explained, as her builder husband stayed at home. He wasn't idle though, he was doing what he was good at – building – although now he was doing it for his family so that they would have somewhere to live on a piece of land that someone had lent them. Others were joining in, and soon they would have a small community of a handful of families living on a piece of land remote enough to make it unsellable, but fertile enough to make it livable.

I did my business with the lawyer and notary and spent a couple of days catching up with old friends and listening to their stories. One morning I went to buy distilled water for the batteries in my solar system, as the levels were beginning to get a bit low and the Mexican man who looks after my house in my absence has no transport and can't carry heavy loads. As I was purchasing some 5 litre containers in the small hardware store the next customer, stood behind me, was launching a spirited complaint against the store owner about a consignment of chicken feed he'd ordered but which hadn't turned up. The owner was saying something about supply problems and the disgruntled customer in the rough local dialect retorted 'Hombre, my chickens will have died of hunger by the time it eventually arrives.'

There was something familiar about the voice and I turned around and found myself looking at the English writer Chris Stewart. 'Problems?' I asked. He did a double take and stared at me. 'What are you doing here?' he asked 'I thought you lived in Denmark.' I explained all that had occurred to me. Chris Stewart, you see, was one of the original emigrees who, as he says, fled Thatcher's Britain and moved to Spain to become a shepherd, living a life of poverty in these here hills. He later wrote a book about it called Driving Over Lemons, which became immensely popular and persuaded thousands to follow in his footsteps. Like me. He was also the founding member of Genesis, along with Peter Gabriel, but he doesn't like to talk about that.

'Things are woeful here,' he said. 'There's no work – I've never seen it so bad.'

We chatted for a few minutes. I told him my theory that this was one of the better places to be. Several centuries of grinding poverty, famines and civil war had made this part of Andalucia resilient, I argued. Most country people over 50 still knew all about growing food and on top of that there had been a mass immigration of downsizers, such as himself, who treated the land and the water with respect. 

'Hmm,' he said, not quite convinced. 'I suppose we'll see.'

Over the rest of my stay I had ample time to think about what was going wrong in Spain. It seems rather unfair that the Spanish people should be made to suffer. They are, after all, some of the most pleasant, helpful and down to earth folks on the planet. Cast aside, for a moment, all those stereotyped images of hot-blooded bullfighting macho types; in my experience the vast majority are family-centred, hard working and full of grace. Neither are they particularly materialistic above a certain minimum level of comfort.

It seems to me that Spain, as part of the EU, has had development rammed down its throat, whether they wanted it or not. The TV commercial for Spain used to be 'Spain – it's a little different' – and it was (and then some!). The task of the politicians was to make it the same as anywhere else. But all that infrastructure that was built seemed to be constructed primarily for the benefit of the hordes of northern Europeans who saw the country as one big golf course and luxury hotel development. Corruption oiled the wheels of illegal land development and speculators piled money into a 'housing' boom (they were not really houses, more like flimsy clinker shells) which was fuelled by the banks. It's a sad tale of environmental despoilation in one of the most beautiful places in Europe and now the local people are left with a toxic legacy of ruined coasts, damaged aquifers and unpayable debt.

As I left to return to Denmark I felt a wave of sadness. People kept telling me how lucky I was to be living in 'safe' Denmark. Soon I will have no further ties to Spain or La Alpujarra. It really does feel like the end of the affair.

Nature's Revenge

In need of a reminder about impermanence? Picture from Organic Green Roots

An article published this week in a British newspaper revealed that scientists say street lighting is having an accelerating effect on various species because the extra light is interfering with both insects and those who predate on them. This is hardly ground breaking news for anyone who has watched a gecko hunt moths around a wall-mounted external light – indeed when we run out of energy for unnecessary lighting it will be a dark day (and night) for geckodom. Inevitably, some of the people commenting on the article seemed to say that we shouldn't worry about the effects our infrastructure has on nature because nature will always evolve ways around it; natural selection, and all that.

Whether species can adapt to our more or less random behaviour seems pretty unlikely to me given the extent that we have changed the environment to suit our own ends and the speed with which we have done so. That's not to say that nature won't eventually adapt – that's what nature does – but given our insistence that we are somehow separate from the natural bio patterns of the planet we evolved to live on, Mother Nature might just agree with us and snuff us out entirely in the medium term. I say the medium term because in the long term we're all fried chicken, as Ugo Bardi pointed out in a marvellous essay this week. Life, it seems, has about another 1.5 billion years to enjoy on Earth before it ends. It won't be a sudden end – like when the Vogons destroyed the Earth to make way for an intergalactic highway at the beginning of the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, but equally, we can't say we weren't warned. Just like Arthur Dent, most of us will still be in our dressing gowns, metaphorically speaking.

So, given that we are guaranteed not to last in the long term and are doing our damnedest to make it harder for us and all of our fellow earthlings in the medium term, the place to focus on would seem to be the short term. What do I mean by the short term? Well, the next 1000 years would be a good starting point. Let's imagine our actions today as seen from the point of view of revellers in the year 3000AD (or equivalent date, who knows what calendar system they will have?) There are still likely to be the crumbling ruins of some of our greatest cities and buildings there for examination by anyone interested in studying life and civilization before the second Dark Ages. By greatest buildings I don't mean things like skyscrapers, which will have been dismantled for their scrap value, but more longer lasting buildings made of materials that are difficult to recycle and use for other means. Some of the grander neoclassical imperial edifices may still be half-standing, such as the Bank of England, the scattered remains of which will be visible to fishermen peering into the shallow waters off the coast of a shrunken future England.

It's probably fair to say that most people these days don't think 1000 years into the future, and if they did they might picture flying cars and holidays on Mars and all the imaginary perks of an industrial era extended far beyond its shelf life. But as the chasm widens between that imagined future and the one we have assured, which involves a much lower level of accessible concentrated energy available for our use, I wonder how many people are prepared to abandon that dream, and all the hard psychological readjustment that this will take. I for one can certainly remember being about 16, kitted out in some new Adidas trainers and walking down the street listening to a tape of the Beastie Boys on my Sony Walkman (Adam Yauch RIP) on a sunny day in Solihull. I clearly remember the feeling that life, as I understood it, just didn't get any better than this and that all of history had climaxed to create the perfect moments like these. We had, I felt, drifted apart from the messy realities taught in history lessons at school and could henceforth just enjoy cool gadgets - like my Walkman.

In retrospect my outlook was as back to front as my baseball cap, but I wasn't the only one thinking such thoughts. Indeed I may have picked them up subconsciously from the ether (alas my baseball cap was not lined with tinfoil) and it was only a year or two later that Francis Fukuyama famously declared the End of History. Of course, he was about as wrong as it is possible to be, but the 16-year-old me could relate to where he was coming from. Who will write the book entitled History's Just Getting Started?

***

Other people

Last week I wrote about one of the skills that will be necessary to negotiate to turbulent waters ahead – that of learning to live without having to purchase so much stuff so that when the unwelcome reality of being forced to live with less material comfort is forced upon us it won't come as such a shock. This week I'd like to raise the novel idea of getting on with other people.

If you have had a peak oil epiphany in the last few years you will know that, unless you are living in Micheal Ruppert's Collapse HQ, you have to keep your mouth more or less closed in polite company. Normally, to suggest that things are not ticketyboo (and then some), you'll get that blank look in which the respondent is mentally removing you from the compartment labelled 'Normal Guy' and refiling you in the one that says 'Deluded Lunatic' - the same compartment in which David Icke and his Space Lizards are filed. Never mind that you have spent literally years fervidly reading about economics, history, ecology and psychology and every single one of them leads you inexorably to the same conclusion that seemed so obvious in retrospect – in the eyes of your interlocutor your opinion is less valid than the one he shares with that bloke in the pub.

At this point it would be tempting to give up and focus on getting something done that you have a reasonable chance of achieving. That's all well and fine, assuming you don't care about other people. But on the other hand, when a close family member or a valued friend seems about to commit the kind of terrible mistake you know could never end well, it becomes a bit more difficult to bite your lip and keep schtum. On the one hand you don't want them to pump their life savings into a shale gas bubble but on the other you're worried that by warning them they'll do it anyway and label you an interfering nutter to boot.

Given that evangelism rarely works the only way I can see around this problem is to effect changes in your own life and be a real-life example. That is, I'm afraid, all we can do, and if your brother is convinced that we'll all have mini thorium reactors in our backyards soon and that he is planning to retire on the income generated from his Facebook shares then I'm afraid you'll just have to let him learn the hard way.

Nevertheless, there are plenty of people out there by now who you could consider 'like minded'. They are scattered all over the place, in every country, and the one thing they share is a resolve not to let the scales be pulled over their eyes any longer. Hundreds more turn up every day, tired of being spoon-fed fairy tales by the mainstream media and driven perhaps by some inner sense that things are not going as well as they have been led to believe. Indeed, the number of peaksters is growing steadily and if they were a traded stock they would be worth investing in as they are one of the few things growing these days, apart from national debt that is.

The Transition movement comes in for a fair bit of criticism from some quarters, but to my mind it's one of the most hopeful things there is. Critics say that it tends to focus on drawing up plans for a transition away from fossil fuels and towards sustainability at the expense of real action. But from the yelps of protest I have heard in reply, this might once have been the case but it is no longer and in my opinion there are worse things you can do than join in with Transition.

As I mentioned in a comment last week, I have seen a collapse happen up close. It wasn't any great shakes in the scale of things and could perhaps be considered a collapse-lite but it did involve lots of people losing their life savings, a few cases of problems putting food on the table and one or two suicides of people I didn't know personally. Yes, this was the time I lived in Spain and the property bubble burst in late 2007. Immediately put out of your minds any thoughts of me living on one of the costas, soaking up the sun every day on the beach and drinking sangria with a bunch of pink skinned expats. Instead I lived in a large valley between two mountain ranges near Granada called La Alpujarra. Considered one of the most backwards regions of Spain, the place didn't even have a supermarket – but what it did have was natural beauty and resilience. Most of the foreigners living there got on extremely well with the locals and it would be no exaggeration to say that the whole area was 'alternative'.

Like most people, we moved there so we could live a simple life. Property was cheap and we bought a small ruined farm, which we did up and lived in. I started a local community newspaper called The Olive Press, specifically to campaign against the growing menace of plastic greenhouses which were spreading across the landscape and threatening to turn this small corner of paradise into a desert. Life was sweet for three short years and we learned just how rewarding it is to live away from the toxic culture of modern life.

When the crash came most people couldn't believe it. Even the people living most simply suddenly found out how reliant they were on the property bubble and I did not escape the carnage either. People suddenly stopped being able to pay for advertising space in the newspaper and we had to get a sales professional in, who took one look at our operation and laughed. Out went the alternative therapy practicioners and yoga teachers and in came the big full page adverts: banks, airlines and estate agents. Similarly chucked out were any editorial ethics and, inevitably, myself. I sold the newspaper to a tabloid journalist and today, as one of the biggest foreign language publications in Spain, it's a celebrity news soaked rag that claims to be 'green' but in fact is nothing of the sort.

Anyway, getting back to the point, when the crash actually happened the most noticeable effect was that people who you thought were your friends swiftly turned out not to be. We all know the type of loose acquaintance I am talking about – the gossipy middle class types who socialise widely and profess charitable intentions at every opportunity. These, in my experience, were the ones to grow sharp talons very quickly and flee town, usually leaving a mess of dishonoured debts and broken promises in their wake.

By contrast, other people, the ones who really did help other people out when TSHTF, are the ones who remain living there. They were the ones with no money but plenty of empathy – and skills – to make things carry on working. By joining together in solidarity and helping each other out, each was able to bear the load a lot more lightly. A few eggs and vegetables donated here, a visit and a cup of coffee there and maybe even looking after someone else's kids for a few days so they could take a temporary job and bring in some cash – all of these actions, although small in their own way, prove to be useful when added up. As cash becomes unreachable the barter economy is right there waiting and every transaction becomes a reinforcing span in the web of the community.

Of course, a few morons exploited the system for their own ends, but the beauty of a system in which cash is no longer king is that people by and large stop doing business with morons. Said moron is then left being unable to meet his needs and no amount of threatening language can get him what he wants. That is why people are very friendly to one another in peasant societies, such as the one we had inserted ourselves into: rudeness becomes an unaffordable luxury when your life might depend on your next door neighbour who just happens to own the only winch capable of pulling you and your car out of a gulley. This is a lesson lots of people are going to have to relearn in the future.

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Peak n'Oil band Number #7

Simon and Garfunkel

As correctly guessed by Russell last week and befitting of this week's post, Simon and Garfunkel are the band coming in at Number 7. The Boxer contains the unforgettable verse:

I have squandered my resistance 
For a pocket full of mumbles such are promises 
All lies and jests 
Still a man hears what he wants to hear 
And disregards the rest 

And then of course what finer expression of the dominant sentiment of our popular atomised individualism could there be than I am a Rock?

And finally, the duo's rendition of Silent Night - 7 o'clock news reminds us that the backdrop to the lullabies we hear is the constant babble of the world's problems, which most of us would rather filter out.