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Idyll speculation as commune strives for Utopian way of life
I'VE always had a fantasy about living a rural idyll surrounded by my favourite people of all ages. It's a dream that doesn't necessarily mean complete self-sufficiency, although growing food and following sound eco-principles would be a sensible part of the deal.
In my mind, complete self-sufficiency is too much tied in with a sort of ghetto mentality – a community within a community intent on pursuing its own goals and objectives possibly to the exclusion of the outside world. The kind of thing that I find more appealing is a small community of friends who look after each other and the space they occupy while also giving to the wider community whatever service they can and looking outward as much as possible.
The idea is still blurry, but was planted when I was quite young and living in a small area of suburbia where it seemed that every other house was occupied by some relative of my mother's great big family. If one of her own four children didn't turn up at lunchtime, Mum knew it was because we were tucking into Auntie Patsy's soup or Auntie Phyllis's famous pasties a few doors away. If one sister was off to the supermarket, the message went out and a joint shopping list quickly circulated, then a child or three was recruited to trot along and help to carry the bags. Clothes got passed down and around in circles until they were past use. Uncles worked together on each other's cars, laid paving in gardens, and mucked in on the allotment down the road that we all benefited from.
To some extent those values were also the stamp of the wider local community, and my parents would not bat an eyelid if they heard I'd been ticked off by Mrs So-and-So up the street for carelessly dropping my lolly paper or repeatedly whacking a ball against the neighbour's gable wall.
My own children have sadly not enjoyed this kind of open-door, share-and-share alike, all-pull-together mindset. Their parents have spent too much of the prime of their lives chasing the clock, chasing work, and chasing a middle-class agenda of activities and accomplishments. We live nowhere near most of our relatives, so family links are not so strong.
Everyone's so intent on going places, that too little time is spent on standing still and appreciating where we are, the things we're lucky to have and asking why life is so difficult for so many. Niggling feelings can be shovelled into the mind's furthermost drawer, then something pricks them to the foreground.
What brought all of this to light again for me was reading about the writer Tobias Jones and a life-changing project he has just embarked on with his wife and two small daughters.
Jones wrote the thought-provoking Utopian Dreams (Faber and Faber, 7.99) about periods spent living in five different "alternative" communities to study the ideals and brutal realities of communal living. Now, taking as their model the Pilsdon Community in Dorset, where around 30 like-minded people live together and work the land, and welcome those on the margins of society (refugees or those struggling with addiction, penury or mental illness, for instance), the Jones family has bought a woodland and created a retreat which will be open to people going through some sort of crisis to join in and live and work as a community.
Exactly how this embryonic commune will work, the effect it will have on the children and the Joneses' marriage, the boring everyday arrangements that can cause irritation and resentment, and how exactly the community will engage with the outside world are factors that have to be grappled with when approaching any such attempt at Utopia. But hats off to them for giving it a go, and their courage in doing so is both inspiring and enviable.
In writing about this new lifestyle, Jones talks about the idea of charity and how the old-fashioned notion of the word has been at the periphery of his family's life, with standing orders and Christmas cheques to good causes used as a way of cleansing the conscience and making them feel better about carrying on living their comfortable life – a sort of off-setting.
He says friends have been sceptical and concerned at the effect on the children of seeing something of the "rough end of life" via some of the struggling people who join the community. But, as he explains, whatever
your interpretation of charity, it really should begin at home –
and how can his children do other than learn to be better human beings from being exposed to humanity in pain?
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Weather for Yorkshire
Saturday 26 May 2012
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