Day one... mission statement

About me: My name is Richard Day and my life has just been turned upside-down.

No single event is behind this, but rather it’s the culmination of several events which have amassed to force me to re-evaluate the life I am living and the life I would like to live.

Two weeks ago my son, Miles, was born. My wife Julia and I are ecstatic and after the initial shock and readjustment we are starting to consider how we are going to bring up our child (and most probably, children).

The second event to throw me into disarray was a film I was fortunate enough to be invited to view yesterday. The Age of Stupid, with Pete Postlethwaite, seemed to come out of no-where and hit me between the eyes. The current trend for all things fore-tellingly apocalyptic and doom laden can tend to provoke a general feeling of helplessness and ineffectiveness against such massive odds, but the individual stories of struggle and hope encapsulated in the film have spurred me into action.

Lastly, turning thirty-four a week ago today made me realise that to achieve the life I want has to start with positive steps in that direction (my apologies if all this sounds like vacuous psychobabble, however I hope to get to the point soon enough).

Briefly, we live in an ex council house on a council estate in Leicester. For the last five years my wife and I have lived in the sunny south of Spain, where we were generally unhappy and desperate to leave. Now we have been back a year and have started to live.

You can never wait to start living.

We found ourselves in an ex council house as we had limited funds and no recent UK work history to verify our good nature. Being in a recession meant Mr Halifax and Mr Barclays were keeping a much tighter grip on the purse strings. However, a loan of £60,000 was agreed and four months ago we moved in.

Okay, I’ll come to the point: this blog is my decision to chart my way through the paradigm I feel that is starting to take hold. I aim to describe, reflect and chart my path through un-chartered territory. Is it possible to live energy (and nutritionally?) free, from the confines of a normal family home? There are plenty of people out there with allotments and small-holdings doing just this, but can we do it with just our 20m x 6m garden? So far I have been fairly successful with the energy situation, being able to heat the house from scavenged firewood and timber from the woods behind our home, but can we do that with food as well? I hope to include advice and open dialogue on the way that we can achieve this in the hope of inspiring others in similar situations to do the same.

In The Age of Stupid, Pete Postlethwaite asks, “why didn't we stop climate change while we had the chance?” I aim to do what I can, not least for Miles, aged two weeks and three days.