Tracey’s Blog

Listening to the Archers is a solitary pleasure in my house, I hide away so the family can’t make fun. Last night’s episode came as a complete surprise – Pat Archer wants to bring the Transition Movement to Ambridge – and with her track record I’m sure she’ll succeed. It got me thinking about life here in Ashton Hayes, about how localisation can be the key to strong and resilient communities and how I live my life here now and I wondered how Ashton Hayes would fare as a “Transition Village”.

While the Parish Council explore grand plans for microgeneration and anaerobic digestors, some Ashton Hayes residents get on with living a low carbon life in very simple and practical ways. They are aware of the need to adapt to the challenges climate change brings and the very real need to reduce our dependency on oil, but they also know that it’s about good quality of life, not self denial and “going without”. We don’t have an “Ashton Hayes pound” like Totnes, but we do trade the most valuable commodity we have – our time – and surplus produce changes hands regularly. In autumn it’s not unusual to see boxes of apples sitting on people’s doorsteps with the hand written message “help yourself”. Just this week I swapped 2 bags of horse manure for a bag of autumn fruiting rasberry canes and some lovely herbaceous perennials for my front garden. We share skills too, when our lawnmower broke, a neighbour repaired it and in return we cooked him a meal using produce from the garden of another neighbour who still grows enough veg to feed his 4 children even though they’ve all left home. Another neighbour is fixing the bust zip on my favourite skirt so I can wear it again and in return I’ll make her a cake using eggs from friends round the corner who keep hens.

At weekends, you can often find me foraging wood for the stove from nearby woodland (we haven’t paid for any wood so far this winter) and hardly a week goes by without someone leaving wood on the drive for us.

This village life is far from a perfect rural idyll, the teenagers complain there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do, without a car it’s hard to access services such as doctors and dentists and with only one small shop  it’s hard to resist the temptation to jump in the car and go to the supermarket. But if we seriously want to live a low carbon life then we must embrace these challenges and see them as opportunities. Some older residents liken it to life during the war, when rationing meant that luxury foods from overseas couldn’t be relied upon, when you ate what you grew and didn’t throw things away without considering giving them a “second life”.

I love my life and can’t think of anywhere I’d rather live. I know that real life is not like the Archers, but I’ll be following Pat and the other Ambridge residents on their “Transition Adventure” and I’m wondering how long it will be before Eddie Grundy accepts Ambridge Pounds in exchange for his homemade cider and Matt Crawford gives up his prestige motor for a folding bike.

(There’s a link to the Transition Movement wikki site on the right hand side of this page and if you want to listen to the Archers you can find it on the Radio 4 page of the BBC website).