The Guardian published an excerpt from Adventures on the Margins of a Wasteful Society, a refreshing chronicle of 12 months' worth of living as a squatter by a London journalist. Having lost her job and refusing to accept an increased rent on her flat in the wake of the financial crisis, Katharine Hibbert found herself on the streets and rather than try to recover from these blows she chose to carry on living without income. Before long, she was saved by a group of squatters who ushered her into the underworld of scavenging, skipping and living on the edge of society. After initial hardships, tears and discomforts, the ex-journalist managed to put down roots with a group of fellow tramps in one squat where no one lurked waiting to evict them. This way, she set out on a path to establishing a sustainable lifestyle, furnishing her room with discarded sofas and cupboards, eating food scavenged from rubbish bins by supermarkets and restraining her plentiful consumerist habits. Funnily, she even started monetizing on rubbish she found by reselling it on the internet.
It all might sound sobering and eye-opening to an ordinary Briton who lives by different standards, but the whole thing reads rather fake just a few hours east of wealthy London, or Britian. First, where in the world, except in a limited number of affluent countries, is anyone likely to come across egg slicers or mellon ballers thrown away as rubbish, kitchen instruments I haven't even seen with my own eyes in normal use living a decent lifestyle in Poland, to say nothing of poorer nations? And how silly does it sound to mention text services and help centres for squatters, who seem to have bought in the material and social comforts that lots of average families are denied in developing or third-world societies? It feels as if the margins of the British society are just so much better place to live at than central venues in half of the outside world. And obviously, they are much better, which puts Katharine's adventures, tears and frustrations in a laughable perspective. Second, I just can't shake this feeling that what she did after having been laid off was quite plainly motivated by boredom, possibly mixed with some calculated attempt at creating an account of living at the fringes of her affluent home country. But it's boredom that stands out and in the Guardian article only she mentions it twice - as a prevailing mood in her job as a journalist and as a realization that dawned on her a year after setting off on her journey as a squatter. Quite clearly, in a rather insured way, retaining sms contact with her boyfriend, keeping in touch with her well-to-do family, picking her birthday presents (yes, a squatter with an iPod), she went through a protected life on the margins, an experiment she was aware she could put an end to at any time to reestablish her link with the mainstream. I certainly honour her conclusions and calls for less waste and greater sense of sharing the abundance the UK has at its disposal, but her memoirs of a self-imposed tramp strike me as half-hearted and penned from a sheltered point of view.
to buy things on a whim,
a wash kit,
to be produced in sweatshops,
to scavenge for food,
to go to waste,
an eviction notice,
to take pity on someone,
to show someone the ropes,
to evict someone from a home,
the court papers arrived,
to catch the eye of the passerby and see contempt there,
theft by finding,
at my lowest ebb,
mobile phone contract,
a paper shredder,
to board up windows,
tax on landfill,
to treat someone as a pest,
slugging is a good term to know
The Guardian is well ahead of other papers in its coverage of environment. Here's one practical promise.
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