The Book of Rubbish Ideas

Richard and Alison Menmuir

At times, it can feel like a physical shift is the only way to break free of our shackles, but there’s a lot of preparation and planning involved in making an ‘actual’ move towards a simpler, happier life.

The Menmuir family were recently featured on the BBC’s Escape to the Country and I caught up with them to find out all about it.

Alison and Richard Menmuir live in Astley on the border of Wigan and Salford. Alison has one son, James, 19, sometimes living at home and Richard has Alasdair, 27 and William, 29, who both live away with their partners.

Richard has been interested in self-sufficiency for several years and has long held views about the dangers of our consumer driven society and the responsibility we all have to respect and protect the resources of our planet; this was influenced by reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Fritz Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful in the 1970s.

Alison also wanted to live a less stressful life and developed a keen interest in protecting our wildlife and fragile ecosystem.

Richard was fortunate to take early retirement in 2005, which enabled them to put some of their ideas and beliefs into practice. Although living on a vastly reduced salary, they found that their standard of living was not commensurately reduced and their quality of life was significantly improved.

Alison told me, ‘On a practical level, we only needed one car; this gave us extra money to put in our savings when we sold Richard’s car and it saved us considerable expense on tax, insurance, servicing, MOT and maintenance.

Large food shopping orders are delivered and Richard purchases daily items locally either on foot or by bike depending on the weight!

Since our downshift, we’ve had more time to cook using raw ingredients, which is cheaper as well as healthier. We’ve also started a very small vegetable patch in the back garden and grow beans, salads, tomatoes, strawberries and a variety of herbs.

We make a lot of our own Christmas presents, for example, chutneys and beeswax candles (Richard keeps bees) and we give homemade Christmas cakes and puddings as presents too.’

I asked why they felt it was important to live lightly, reduce their rubbish and have a low carbon footprint.

Our aim is to make our impact on the environment as least damaging as possible so we make every effort to apply the Reduce, Reuse and Recycle principles in our everyday lives.

The most important of these is to reduce our consumption. We travel less by car, reduce the energy used in lighting, heating and hot water and generally avoid any unnecessary consumerism.

We try to recycle whatever we cannot reuse, although this can be frustrating at times because it is dependent on local recycling facilities. We compost all of our vegetable waste and brown card.

Over the last few years we have become a lot more inventive in reusing many different things. For example, we use toilet roll middles to make plugs for seedlings, friends donate large plastic pop bottles to use as cloches and slug barriers in the garden, we use wax bread wrappers in place of sandwich bags. We do not buy wrapping paper for presents any more; instead we either reuse wrapping paper given to us, or any clean, interesting paper we come across. At Christmas we cut out Christmassy pages from newspapers or magazines to use as wrapping paper and it’s surprising how good they can be. We also send e-cards to our family instead of paper cards - they do the same so we’re not just being mean!

We have also stopped flying on holiday and either camp or stay in bed and breakfast or small hotels in the UK. It was an eye-opener to find out just how little we knew of the UK! Being keen on walking and observing wildlife and nature, our holiday activities are generally very low carbon emitting, apart from puffing and panting up and down hills! We also contribute towards the local economy of where we are visiting.

Tell us more about the programme you appeared on and how did it all come together?

We applied to be on Escape to the Country (BBC) in July 2008 and were accepted immediately. The first step involved a visit by a researcher and a cameraman to film our house and to ask us preliminary questions such as why we wanted to move, what we were going to do and what sort of property we were looking for; this was a very long day!

Once the production company gave us the go-ahead we were put up in a hotel in Oswestry from Monday to Friday in early August. We met the filming and production team, which included Jules, the presenter; they were all extremely friendly and made us feel very welcome. For the rest of the week we were taken to view a number of houses and also took part in some of the activities we plan to do when we move and were taken on some trips to familiarise ourselves with the area.

Richard was quite nervous but Alison proved to be a natural in front of the camera! Overall, it was a thoroughly enjoyable, if tiring, experience and, in spite of not finding our dream house, we had a great time.

Tell me about your hopes for the future with regard to sustainable living.

Our main priority is to find a house with the right sort of land for growing our own fruit, vegetables and herbs and for keeping bees. Ideally, we’d also like some woodland to provide most of our heating and cooking fuel. Richard is currently taking a course in horticulture to improve his skills while we try and find somewhere.

Could you give out a few top tips for any readers who want to live a more sustainable life?

Make yourself aware of the impact of your lifestyle on the future of the planet. This will make it easier to apply the Reduce, Recycle and Reuse principles.

Grow your own, even if you don’t have a big garden. Lots can be grown in containers. Convert flower borders into a veg patch and some vegetables and herbs can be very attractive in the garden.

Our family and friends really appreciate homemade birthday and Christmas presents, as they are more personal than just going out and buying lots of gadgets that they won’t use!

Start with small steps.  You’ll soon gather pace once you get into it.

It’s amazing when you realise how much ’stuff’ you don’t actually need to lead a comfortable and rewarding life.

And there you have it.

Physical house moves can be difficult to aspire to for many different reasons, but you can make lots of changes in your own four walls that have the power to change the colour of your world.

Take a look at the good advice on the InterNational Downshifting Week website, dip your toes in to a bit of simple, green living and get yourself on the right track. 

You might find you like the changes you experience so much and realise you don’t need to move anywhere…

Rubbishly yours,

TSx