Dave's blog

In a lot of ways it is very easy to live any kind of lifestyle without any outside influence. Ellie and me have been going along quite nicely in our own private land of not spending. We’ve had people over for the odd cup of tea but as Bristol tends to empty at weekends for festivals (well the people we know anyway) we’ve not had any major social gatherings.
An old friend from Northampton called earlier in the week last week and asked if it was a good time for him to stay. I originally thought it might not be as
a)It was to be Ellie’s and my last weekend together in Bristol until mid September and
b) I wasn’t sure of my friends reaction to our chosen lifestyle and if we could feed him and his wife!

I put him off but by Thursday I began to think it might not be such a bad idea so I called him back and suggested he came down. Andy (my Brother) was having a party on Saturday night which meant there would be entertainment and plenty of his strange home-brew concoctions.

On Friday night I got another call from an old University friend asking if he and his girlfriend could stay. I hesitated again but this particular friend I’d not seen for quite some time (years rather than months) and didn’t want to turn him away. Coincidently this was the same friend who lived in the small holding in Oxfordshire, near where we picked the cherries and where we started this whole free way of living.
So come Saturday afternoon Anthony arrived with his girlfriend and Helm and his wife were due to meet us later that evening once they’d done a bit of shopping in Bristol’s Cabot circus (or Car boot circus as we call it).

Anthony was and still is an out and out mushroom nerd and whenever I see him I take the opportunity to go out walking and pick his fungal filled brain. We went up to Ashton Court as I’d been up there looking for fungi with fellow forager Fergus Drennan (don’t you just love alliteration)
We identified a few but none were in any fit state to take home and eat due to the bad weather. During the walk I decided to let them in on the way of life we’d be leading. For some reason I assumed that he, and his girlfriend Leander, wouldn’t be that put by our freegan lifestyle as apart from the bin diving element it is much the same as theirs. The drive back from Ashton court proved my assumption correct as Leander suggested we stop at every supermarket bin we passed. Quite disappointingly we found nothing but potatoes on this particular mission. I’d just recently pulled the main potato harvest that week and we had a huge sackful of the things at home. Still waste not want not, potatoes keep very well so we could quite easily store these without them spoiling.

I thought we’d again struggle to feed six, however Anthony produced a very large bag of carrots they’d bought from Covent Garden market for next to nothing earlier that week to add to the evening meal. So for dinner I made roast potatoes,carrots, shallots and beetroot and covered it with gravy made from the last few days vegetable scraps. Despite filling every baking tray we had it didn’t seem like enough food so we mopped up with some bread (our freezer is now full to bursting with bread after a bin mission to Waitrose) and finished with a home-grown apple and late season gooseberry crumble. We’ve got a dying apple tree in the back yard that seems to be producing palatable apples months earlier than it should be. Some varieties of apple do produce in August but we’ve been cooking the windfalls since mid-July!!

Ellie pushed me to tell Helm and his wife Karen how we’d been living. At first I felt a bit uncomfortable telling them as of recent years Helm has lived what many might consider a fairly mainstream lifestyle. He and his wife work nine to five, they like to shop, they are home-owners, car owners and have recently bought a large TV to watch their every growing DVD collection. In many ways their life-style is quite polar opposite to ours. Having said that they both have quite a strong environmental conscience. Not only is the car they drive is perhaps the smallest and most economical I’ve ever seen but despite living in a flat they still compost the majority of their kitchen waste in two wormeries on their balcony.
Helm wasn’t phased by it at all, instead he told me of the times he got free sandwiches on long-distance train journeys as the canteen was closing (why didn’t we think of that on the way back from Totnes!!!). His wife on the other hand seemed to shuffle in her seat a little. She is not the type to say if she did feel uncomfortable but I sort of sensed something might be wrong.

Both of them left not long after breakfast the following day claiming they wanted to get back to an event in Northampton. I wasn’t overly convinced but gave them the benefit of the doubt and besides they said they had a good time and I believed them.

Anthony and Leander stayed for the following day and we decided to spend our time in Cheddar and the surrounding Mendips on the search for an ever illusive giant puffball. Our timing was quite strange as we seemed to coincide with two quite nasty incidents. The first was on the way into Cheddar village where we saw some police tape and a policeman coming out of a house in a mask and full protective whites. It was like a scene from Mid-Summer Murders only a little more unnerving! After a walk around the gorge and the town, making the most of the plums growing around and free samples of cheese and beer, we drove up the hill to the top of the gorge. Rescue vehicles were passing us left right and centre all the way up and we could tell that something was going on. We saw what looked like a body on the rocks at the top of the gorge and for the second time that day we all felt a little shaken.

I later looked up both these events and the first was indeed a murder and the second although quite a bad accident the young boy involved was not fatally injured.

So after leaving the soap opera capital of the South West we headed for Ellie’s Mum’s house as Ellie had to pick up her birth certificate for an application. At this point we were still mushroomless but Ellie’s Mum had told us that her husband (and Ellie’s Dad) had seen a giant puffball the day before while he was out walking. We all politely drank tea and chatted for a bit and I sensed that Anthony was itching to get out and find the Calvatia gigantea.

It wasn’t long before we were out in the hills and there on the side of a field we could see a large white dot in the distance. As we got near and nearer we broke into a run before falling at the foot of the Calvatia gigantea. It had already been picked and was sitting loose on the hillside so there were none of the usual worries of depriving the area of a fruiting puffball.

As we Anthony and Leander dropped us off in Bristol we cut the puffball in two and the following night we had one of the most delicious meals I’ve had since we started our Freegan experiment.
Ellie’s mum had given us some rice that had been in her cupboard for years and was approaching it’s use by date and I cooked that up along with home grown shallots, the last of the stock and some saffron I’d got from doing a slot about Freeganism on CBBC’s Gastronuts. That was served up with steamed and then griddled carrots in olive oil and steamed skipped asparagus spears (Ellie had found that day outside Waitrose) with butter fried puffballs (cooked in a butter portion left on a table in a cafe in Cheddar). Following this was Waitrose finest chocolate moose and fresh strawberries.

It’s been a while now we’ve both been living for free so things we had in the first month are beginning to run out. The festival last weekend did supply us with a lot of essentials we would have normally had to buy namely toothpaste, sun-cream (not that we need to much of that!), shampoo and conditioner all left by people leaving early.
We are running low on laundry liquid and so are trying to stretch our clothes out a little longer that I normally would. I’ve been much more rigid than normal with what are outdoor scruff clothes and which are for best. It’s amazing how quickly new clothes can become ruined and become ‘allotment ware’. Even despite doing this the laundry basket is filling up and we’ll have to use the last of the liquid soon.

I’m not sure if it will work with laundry liquid but up to now I’ve been employing a two week rule. Back in March we needed a new toaster as ours gave up the ghost and fixing it was beyond my skills. I thought to myself that I wouldn’t buy a new but instead would wait until one turned up. Within two weeks I found a discarded working toaster where my friend was working as a security guard at an abandoned print works.
Time and time again I tried this method since, we wanted a juicer so waited two weeks and one turned up in the street. The same with work boots, a griddle pan, a electric whisk, a bread machine, a pair of wellies and both of us got new clothes in a clothes swap last week. I honestly think that if you live in a city or large town and you want anything then try waiting two weeks and one will turn up, I’ve even got a bed that way in the past.

For the avid festival goer in the UK there are at least three large festivals to choose from every weekend from June to the end of August. The weekend just gone (24th – 26th July) there was the Womad festival, Camp Bestival, Truck Festival and Secret Garden Party, all now established and all over 10, 000 people! They are huge money spinners for the organisers and retailers alike as the average spend on a festival weekend is now

Yes that’s right SIX HUNDRED POUNDS! £600 is more than I live off in month, even before this experiment! If £600 is the average, this means some people spend more! Unless I became a cocaine addict with a passion for hiring sports cars I don’t think I could every spend that much in a single weekend. So if £600 is the average could it be possible to do an entire festival for nothing?
I has a head start on most as early this year I emailed loads of festivals to try and do some workshops. A few got back to me but then working at the Eden project meant I had to cancel some of them. One I could do as it was in July rather than August was Camp Bestival down in Lulworth Cove. It’s a fantastic part of the country and somewhere I would go on holiday even without a festival taking place, so getting a free pair of tickets to do a wild food walk was a real bonus.

After putting messages all over the internet on car-share schemes and even this very site weeks in advance it got closer to the date and no-one was coming forward to drive us. In despair I emailed the woman who booked me in the first place to see if she had any ideas. She put me in touch with someone who was driving down on the Friday (who quite by chance lived around two minutes walk from my house).

Our companions for the trip down to Dorset were due to join their wives and children who had set up on the festival site a few days before to run a stall. They were really friendly and the journey down flew by just chatting about what we all respectively did for a living and generally getting to know each other. They were TV music producers and by the sounds of things quite busy and skilled at their trade. We didn’t mention our no-money experiment and as we’d already agreed to pay for travel if essential – Our plan was to offer petrol money, or if they asked we would give them it. On arrival we had the usual great British politeness stand off – ‘are you sure you don’t want any petrol money?’ ‘go on please take it’ etc, etc. In the end we agreed to give them £10 for parking.

As we set foot into the festival we’d spent £5 each rather than the £410 the average person had already spent at this point. Some might see this as a defeat but our no-money rules meant we only spent money transport (when unable to travel by bike), bills, rent and tax – Dorset is a 2-3 day cycle and Ellie couldn’t get that time off work. To me this experiment is more to do with self-reliance than blagging off someone else; so paying someone kind enough to drive us on a 6 hour round trip just ten pounds didn’t seem like a defeat to us!

The first night was easy, we had a gas hob, food to cook on it (pasta from the coffee barter) and some booze we had in the back of the cupboard. It’s amazing really just what you can find lying around your home that is perfectly edible or drinkable. I think alcohol is one of those things that most will have a bottle or two of something lying around. Booze is often left for years and years before a brave (or alcoholic) friend turns up and drinks it all. A friend of mine told me a story of his near alcoholic mate turning up at his parents house and drinking a bottle of whiskey with a label reading ‘by appointment to his majesty the King’. So later that night we watched Mercury Rev and for the first time in what seemed like months, both of us were feeling a little tipsy.

Our easy ride of Friday began to wain a little as whilst boiling water for tea the gas burner ran out of gas! I was feeling a little fuzzy from the night before at this point and just wanted a caffeine hit to get me started. The water was half way to boiling when it died so we did at least have luke warm tea and instead of porridge we ate the last of the croissants we’d gleaned the week before from a Tesco bin.

I did have my storm kettle as a back up for the gas burner but unsure of the fire regulations and as security seemed to be quite tight (we got told off quite a lot on Friday night for various very minor misdemeanor’s – like being in the wrong field at the wrong time!) we decided it best to leave the festival site to cook our lunch and dinner.

Camp Bestival is a festival by the sea, so for those inclined, a good day’s foraging could be had. On the Friday we had already foraged nettle tops, jelly ear fungus and a few other bits and bobs from the festival perimeter but on the Saturday we decided to take a walk down to the cove and see what diverse goodies Lulworth had to offer.
We were not disappointed, on the two mile walk to the beach we found the last of the wild cherries, cherry plums, horse mushrooms, sorrel and some fat hen! The cove itself was full of coastal favourites like sea beet and rock samphire.

We made a delicious one pot pasta meal on the base of the storm kettle and sat eating our bartered and foraged feast looking out to sea as the sun was setting (whilst removing stinging ants from various parts of our body).

We arrived back at the festival for P J Harvey and some obscure Mexican aniseed, honey booze I pulled from the back of the cupboard at home. Perhaps it was the lack of anything else to drink rather than being as bad as I remembered (hence being left in the cupboard for months) it was actually really nice. It was also incredibly strong – a little like a Mexican ouzo.

By the Sunday we thought ’sod it’ to security and decided to cook on the storm kettle inside the perimeter. We were in Crew camping which meant security were in the same field as us and every security guard at the festival had to walk past our tent. Whilst boiling up our morning cuppa using scraps of wood and discarded cardboard I started to rouse a little attention. Rather than tell me off security were fascinated by the workings of the storm kettle. One even jotted down the name of the company that made them and swore he would buy one for the next festival he was working at.
It also attracted the attention of a festival geek, he spotted it from across the field and ran over in an affected ‘kooky’ manner.
‘wow, what’s that, is it a milk churn, is it a …..’
I cut him off mid flow, ‘It’s a storm kettle, it boils water quickly with very little fuel’
‘oh, well, yeah, I just thought it looked weird, I know you’ve told me what it is but it looks weird, I mean is it a puzzle, a jug within a jug’
‘Are you a dickhead within a wanker’ I felt like replying but bit my tongue and grinned.

I’m not surprised it got so much attention as they are a very useful bits of kit, the kettle itself sits on what is essentially a portable container for a fire. It also needs very little fuel to burn and will boil 1.5 litres of water in very little time.

Sunday lunch was a high point, we cooked up a noodle soup using the rock samphire, a small piece of block coconut cream, curry powder, some jelly ear, sorrel, beet spinach, nettles and a little bit of a half bottle of wine we found discarded as someone had left the festival. It was absolutely delicious and set me up for the wild food walk I was set to do that afternoon.

By evening we were feeling a little smug as heavy rain was forecast the next day and we’d done it, we’d gone through a whole festival without spending a penny! We had timed it well also as we had just a Tupperware box of turnip curry left to have that evening. As we packed up the tent we gave the curry a little sniff to see what we had in store for later and both of us nearly retched. Nearly three days in the Dorset sun had not done good things to this humble turnip meal and against all of our principals we were forced to throw away this fermenting box of veggies.

We arrived at the camp-site of the bloke who drove us and instantly sensed something was afoot. We weren’t mistaken and for reasons I won’t go into here our lift was now to leave in the morning rather than in five minutes! SHIT, SHIT, SHITTY, SHIT! I thought to myself, we have nothing to eat! The rain started to pour and we sat down to gather our thoughts assuring our hosts that leaving tomorrow was no problem at all.
We were hungover, sleep deprived, tired, hungry and now a little demoralised and both decided this was time to call an end to the experiment, we had to eat!
Wandering over to the field with all the catering vans we soon realised we had no idea what food was on offer. I had seen Hugh Fernly Whitingstall the night before and recalled that he had a River Cottage stand at the festival. I couldn’t help but feel a little awkward as he passed me in a crowd, he stared at me right in the eye as if he recognised me from somewhere. I felt like talking to him but I couldn’t help but think about my Chef within a Chef blog where I suggest that you stuff Anthony Worrel Thompson straight up Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s arse! How can I say, ‘yeah, I’m quite a fan of your work, did you read that blog about shoving a short fat man up your anal passage?’. That aside River Cottage would at least be local, seasonal, organic and free range so if we were going to spend money it would at least support local farmers and not line the pockets of large oil companies or multi-nationals.
I’m not sure what I expected, It was all bloody meat, not a single veggie meal to be had or at least none that seemed worthy of breaking our not spending regime. We moved on and queued for our joint favourite – flat Italian pizza. We’d seen people eating it all weekend and now we wanted to sample it for ourselves. It seemed half the festival had the same idea and the queue didn’t budge for around half and hour. This gave us enough time to come to our senses, we could forage and cook a meal in the time it would take to get served. We headed back to get the storm kettle and on the way found a loaf of bread and some margarine left by someone vacating the festival. The festival fatigue was really getting us by this point and we thought well we’ll eat some bread then go look for some more food.
Whilst eating the bread and butter an odd thing happened, although very plain it became one of the nicest things I’d ever eaten! After a number of slices with a little foraged sorrel and rock samphire I had in my pocket from the night before we both felt strangely satisfied.
To avoid the rain that was now chucking it down we had an early night followed by a breakfast of bread and butter. The long sleepy ride home was punctuated by finding red currents in a lay-by and the rest of Monday was spent recovering gently by eating, sleeping and generally making the most of not being under canvas.