A letter from a Wicked Uncle

(this is mainly in reply to a blog post from my niece)

There are no conclusions. We live in a narrative arc of which we shall not live to see the end. I also am mad, but it does not matter. My goal - and, I suggest, yours also - should not be to cease to be mad, not be to be 'cured', but to live well and fruitfully as we are. To quote a famous prayer

Give me strength to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Yes, I do think the cause of the modern epidemic of mental illness is a sickness of society, not of individuals. I do think that those of us who manifest the symptoms of that illness are the canaries in the coal mine. You're right, of course, that for each of us, one of the seeds of our madness is childhood trauma - different childhood traumas, granted, with different impacts - but that doesn't invalidate my thesis. One can absorb just so many blows before a bone breaks, a blood vessel bursts, an organ shuts down, and equally the mind can accept just so many insults before it, in its own way, manifests injury. In a less sick society, would your childhood trauma have tipped you over into what the psychiatrists describe as 'mental illness'? Would mine?

I don't know. We can't know. But I suspect it would have been much less likely.

In any case, I don't think that doping myself into a condition in which I can tolerate society as it is is a solution which benefits anyone. But, I am not you. I have been able - I have been fortunate to be able -  largely to retreat from the world, to isolate myself to a high degree from the strains of our society. You cannot easily do that. You have to find your own way of living with the Black Dog, and it isn't for me to criticise your choices.

We spoke a lot yesterday about narratives, and memes; about narrative elements such as the king or magus - for example Myrddin, now usually known as Merlin, who was reputedly both - going mad and living wild in the forest for seven years. Tellingly, much the same story is told of Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, almost a thousand years before him. About memes which repeat in many narratives. I have not consciously emulated Myrddin, that is not why I am here, but nevertheless my own narrative does in part repeat that meme. There is benefit for someone who is primarily a thinker in retreating from the world, in surrounding themselves with small physical tasks, with constrained possibilities; it helps one to slow down, to unwind, to separate the significant from the trivial. It also allows painful processes which exist below the layers of the conscious mind gradually to work themselves through.

Again, though, I have as a privilege the possibility of such a retreat, and you do not. Whether it would be good for you or not, you cannot be criticised for not taking an option you haven't been offered, and I'm not criticising. I'm also not pretending that I know that it would work for you. I don't.

But your distress at the sea of knowledge which you cannot navigate, which threatens to overwhelm you, is exactly the sort of distress which a retreat into simpler life, into simpler social interactions, into simpler tasks can address. No-one now can know the entirety of human knowledge. If that were ever possible, it was already ceasing to be possible by the fourth century BCE. Consequently, if one seeks to do something useful with knowledge, one must find a niche within knowledge in which one can do creative work.

We spoke yesterday about the software stack. Below the sort of software I write, there is a servlet container, a database engine, and some other essential daemons. These, I need to know how to command directly; I must know how to speak their languages, how to invoke them, how to address them. How to command them. But below those daemons are system libraries, and those I don't need to know much about. I need to trust them, as I need to trust the daemons. but I don't need to understand them. Below the system libraries is the operating system kernel. It is twenty years since I really understood what happens in the kernel. I don't need to. Again, it is sufficient that I trust. Below that again, the BIOS, and below that again, the microcode. All these layers are software; below the software stack are the hardware layers, which these days I really understand hardly at all.

I trust them. That is what matters. I understand the relationships between the intellectual artefacts on which my work sits, and I trust the competence and integrity of the people responsible for those artefacts, and that enables me to do useful work.

Software is a metaphor, of course. What is true of the software I write is just as true of my philosophical explorations. I build on ideas from Popper, from Kropotkin, from Feyerabend. They, in turn, built on ideas from further back in the history of philosophy. I have to understand, to examine, to question, to criticise the arguments of these people on whose my work is based, and in doing so I have to have at least some idea of the tree which stretches out beyond them. But if I trust those people on whom I found my argument, part of that trust is that I trust them to have examined those on whom they found theirs, and so on back.

So what I'm saying to you is that, in your studies, your task is simple. To find people who have produced useful work on which you can build. To establish whether you trust them. And once you've established that you do, treat them as your rocks, and build with confidence.

Your work - and mine - is something we can change. Have courage. Do it.

Your madness is, I suspect, something you cannot change - something which will be with you for the rest of your life. Find strength. Thole it. But, more than thole it, try to carry it gracefully, for your own sake and for the sake of those around you. That is certainly what I believe about my own madness, and how I attempt to bear it.

Madness is not easy. It's not fun. I wish that it could be taken away from you (and from me). But I have walked the path before you, and I am still walking. It is possible to live with it. It is possible to live well with it. Have hope. You can do this.

The Great Replumbing

You'll recall, if you've been reading this blog with any attention, that I built this house in a hurry, as protection from winter, at a time when I was broke and suffering significantly from depression, and with the intention that it should be a temporary dwelling while I sought planning permission for the house I really wanted to build.

There were things which were done poorly, partly because I was broke and partly because I wasn't anywhere near the top of my game. I salvaged a gas hob a caravan that was being demolished. It was free, and was a heck of a lot better than the camping stove I'd used in the summer palace, but it was partly broken and burned poorly, creating lots of soot. I couldn't work out how to get to the jets to clean them, and over time all my pans became hideously sooty. Over the past six months, I've become increasingly aware that the dirt it was producing was itself depressing me.

Then, the hot water system. The hot water system was put together in a hurry, and not well. I plumbed the hot cylinder directly into the thermosyphon circuit rather than using its indirect coil, largely because doing so used less copper pipe and copper pipe is expensive. This meant, of course, that iron sludge from the back boiler in the stove accumulated in the cylinder and stained the hot water, which again isn't perfect.

Furthermore, the water in the cylinder boiled if I tried to get the oven hot enough to cook in, so the amount of cooking I could do with the stove is limited - I could neither bake nor roast.

I'd intended to put the bath under the stairs, behind the back of the stove. Again it meant less plumbing, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. I didn't want to put the bath directly against the clay-rendered walls because, of course, water has a rather disastrous effect on clay render. But in practice the inevitably dark corner of the house between the wall, the bath and the hot water tank became and remained a rather dirty dumping ground for all sorts of unwanted items, and that too left me less than cheered. Finaly, I'd made the structure which supported the water tank very quickly and not well out of unwanted left-over scraps of wood, and it looked a mess. It reminded me whenever I saw it of how rough I'd been when I made it.

Taken together, all these things mean that I'd never actually photographed that corner of the house, which is why there's no real 'before' picture in this post. And so many things in the house needed to change. One of the things I planned for this winter was what I called in my head 'the great replumbing'.

Firstly, I have panelled the rear corner of the house with match-boarding, on the back wall up to 'dado-rail height', on the north wall right up to the wallhead. This is a bit experimental. In theory you shouldn't have any structure joining the sill plate to the wall plate on a structural bale wall, because the bales should be allowed to compress naturally. However, the walls have been up eighteen months, and they have not compressed very much; furthermore I'm guessing that they've done most of the compressing they're ever going to do, at least until the house finally rots.

Secondly, I've made a new cabinet - properly, or, at least, very much better - to house the water cylinder; this one has a proper storage cupboard, with a door, under the cylinder, and an airing cupboard beside the cylinder.

 Then I bought a second hand gas hob unit off eBay, which arrived beautifully packaged. It doesn't exactly fit into the cabinet I made for the old one, but is good enough. It burns clean, is easy to maintain, and as an added bonus, has four rings instead of two.

I bought two radiators, one a heated towel rail, one a panel radiator as big as I could fit on the back wall. The objective of this was mainly to be able to pump heat out of the stove without boiling the water in the cylinder.

And finally, with help from Fred Coleman, I replumbed. The thermosyphon circuit now goes through the indirect coil in the cylinder, so the water in the hot taps is now clean. The central heating circuit is taken off thermosyphon circuit, bypassing the cylinder, to allow me to dump heat. An electric pump is designed to circulate water through the central heating circuit. The bath is moved into the back corner of the house, against the newly panelled walls.

And a lot of this has worked wonderfully. The house is so much cleaner! The former dumping ground is now definitely the most attractive, well finished part of the interior. With the central heating pump running, the house becomes very warm - warmer, even, than urban people keep their houses. The pump is quiet, and seems to use very little electricity. The new hob improves life enormously.

So what hasn't worked, or, at the moment, doesn't work?

I can't heat the hot water above tepid. For some reason, the water is preferring to circulate through the central heating circuit rather than through the coil. This is really critical, because for me long hot baths are essential to a good life. Also, the thermosyphon circuit still boils, if I run the stove too hot, so I still can't bake.

Obviously these problems are related. If I could get the hot water to heat, it would take heat out of the thermosyphon, which wouldn't boil nearly so easily, so I could run the stove hotter for longer. [Later: the problem proved to be an air-lock, and simply fixed. Now I can have hot baths again and bake. It's still possible to boil the water, however - one big radiator is not enough to dump all the heat my stove can produce]

The solution I'm considering is to fit a venturi tee to the return side of the thermosyphon circuit, where the central heating rejoins. This would mean that the pumped water in the central heating circuit would entrain water from the coil, effectively sucking hot water through it. However, as far as I can see it would still mean that the cylinder would only heat significantly when the pump was running, so I'm not convinced this is the optimum solution. What I want to do is heat the hot water preferentially  and then switch on the pump when the hot water reaches a pleasant bath temperature, in order to dump excess heat into warming the house.

However, the great replumbing has crystallised a thought which has been growing steadily in my mind for a year now. I like this house. I like it very much. I'm happy with it - contented with it. I don't actually want to build another.

The Winter Palace as philosophical object

The first little pig built his house of straw, and so did I.

I've written previously about this house as structure and as politics. Now it's time to write about it as a philosophical statement, and as a philosophical statement, the fact that it is built of straw is significant.

It's not actually built from straw grown in my own field; it was meant to be, but as I have written earlier in 2011, due to heavy rain through the back end of the year, my barley crop failed and I was unable to harvest straw. So, actually, there are 'food miles' - litres of diesel consumed - in transporting straw. But not many.

Similarly, the timbers of my roof were not actually cut in my own wood. They could have been, but I have few trees which are yet big enough and in any case there would not have been time to season the timber. The roof lining is plywood from Finland, so more food miles - but it is at least spruce plywood, so the same species as most of my own trees. The floor planking is tropical hardwood, from Malaysia. But it was imported fifty or more years ago, to form the floor of a school in Glasgow; I have it second hand, literally recycled. Counted in terms of cost to the planet, my re-use of the floor planking seems to me to be better than free: carbon that would otherwise have been put back into the cycle is conserved out of cycle, for now. The bearers are of oak, but again it's re-used, second hand railway sleepers, and in any case I've personally planted thousands of oak trees - to use some oak seems to me justifiable. Apart from that, all the timber in this building is spruce and larch produced in Scotland. There are food miles, but not in the global scale of things many.

Furthermore, all of these materials - except the Malay hardwood - are local to this landscape. The render on the walls, of clay, is also local to this landscape. When I cease to maintain the building, when the roof starts to rot (as it will) and ceases to be watertight, when water gets into the straw and rots it too, the building will revert very quickly into compost - into fertile soil from which new trees will grow. Within fifty years, it will be gone completely, leaving no trace. The impact of this building on this landscape is extraordinarily light.

The stranger in this woodpile is, of course, glass. The front of the building has a lot of glass. The back window, also, obviously, has glass. Less obviously, both floor and roof are stuffed with glass fibre insulation. I would hope that when I'm gone someone will rob out those window units and re-use them somewhere else, but if they don't, glass is fundamentally only silica which is itself native to this landscape.

Still, I don't like the idea of leaving behind panes of glass which may break, become hidden in debris, and later cause injury to passing animals or people.

There's also copper - a small amount in electrical cables and a more significant amount in plumbing - but that is precious metal and one can be reasonably confident that that will be robbed out and re-used. My good enamelled steel bath is also an asset which I'm sure someone will re-use for something, even if it is only as a water trough for animals.

So yes, it isn't perfect. This is not the platonic eco-house. It would have been better had I used sheep-wool as insulation, and better still if I had come up with some more bio-degradable solution to glazing. But for all that, this house is light on the land; this house will leave little trace. And I'm proud of that.

Madness as symptom

OK, I know this is something of an obsession of mine, but that's OK. I'm mad, and mad people are allowed to have obsessions...

This morning on the radio yet another 'scientist' was interviewed about a theory he had of what's 'wrong' with mad people, and how you might 'cure' it. I get seriously pissed off about this trope.

What's wrong is, it's category error. It's missing the point. What's wrong with mad people is that there is nothing wrong with mad people. Granted it isn't comfortable being mad, granted we'd all of us very much rather not be mad. But there's nothing wrong with us. We do not have a disease. We are not a disease. We are a symptom. What's sick is society. We are people with a lower tolerance to stress - and with more dramatic abreactions to stress - than the norm. We're the canary in the mine shaft. We instrument the level of stress and disharmony in the societies in which we live.

Mass-prescribing anti-depressants and anti-psychotics does not solve any problem at all; it does not cure any disease at all. It's like prescribing cough-linctus to asbestos miners. Mass prescribing anti-depressants and anti-psychotics masks a symptom, and the consequence of symptoms being masked is that no-one gets round to curing the disease.

What's sick, is society. We are the symptom. Cure the disease, and the symptom will cure itself.

Bother, said Pooh

People who keep up with my news will be aware that three weeks ago, I very stupidly dug through my own electricity cable. I actually got it fixed last week, but we've had a fortnight of uncharacteristically calm weather; the wind has not blown, and consequently despite the repaired cable my battery bank has not recharged.

And consequently I have been being extremely parsimonious with electricity, because, essentially, I haven't had any.

And consequently I've been more or less off the net. While I was off the net, the node of Amazons cloud which hosted journeyman.cc died, and the image of journeyman.cc was lost.  Unfortunately, the backup was not complete. That was my fault, not Amazon's. I lost much more than just my blog, but my blog was one of the things that was lost. Of course, I had planned to transfer my blog here - to blogger - for some time, but I hadn't done it. I shall transfer all the stories which were in my backup of the database here shortly.

On land reform

[this is slightly edited from my response to the Scottish Government's recent consultation on land reform]

Introduction: on the basis for private land ownership

The lands which now comprise Scotland did not come into existence private. God did not give out property deeds graven on tablets of stone. Rather, over the past four thousand years, successive peoples have come into Scotland and taken land more or less by force from its previous occupiers. There can be no square inch of Scotland now, which has been passed down peacefully within the family from generation to generation from its original settlers. Rather, all land in Scotland has changed hands by murder, theft, extortion or deceit, most of it many times. There is no land-holding in Scotland now which is not based at some remove on malfeasance.

The most iniquitous malfeasance has been in the enclosure of commons. Until the eighteenth century, most of Scotland's land was not enclosed; rather, local people had rights of common across it. The legal theory under which land 'owners' were able to arbitrarily extinguish those rights was, to say the least of it, novel. In this part of Scotland at least, the enclosure was fiercely resisted by 'levellers', which is to say, the dispossessed majority. Enclosure progressed across Scotland slowly, and by the time the far north west was enclosed, the public mood had begun to swing against the 'right' of enclosure. So instead of 'the Highland Enclosures' we now speak of 'the Highland Clearances', but in fact the process, whether called 'clearance' or called 'enclosure', has been the same. The people of Galloway were just as deprived of ancient rights and livelihood, just as driven off the land, as the people of Caithness. It's just, for us, the process happened earlier.

Having said this, land in Scotland is (by and large) now held privately and that is established political fact. While one may argue about the outcomes for which farming is optimised, by and large lowland Scotland is farmed productively. A revolution which made our farming significantly less productive would not be a good thing.

Subsidy on private land ownership

Currently, farming subsidies are paid to landowners in ways which are opaque to the general public and which appear to have no upper bound. The intention of the common agricultural policy is, we are told, to keep people on the land. But in practice in Scotland, farm subsidy is a payment made to the rural super-rich out of the taxes on, inter alia, the rural working poor. There is no possible justification for this: it is a huge, cancerous injustice which causes grave damage to the economy and to the social fabric of rural communities.

Land ownership is a good, for which people are prepared to pay a great deal; land is a finite resource, of which there is not sufficient for everyone in Scotland to have a fair share while making that share an economic holding. People who own an unfair share of a good should not be subsidised.

If the purpose of agricultural subsidy is to keep people on the land, then there should be a cap on the amount of it that any individual holding can claim, and that cap should be at greatest less than the median income (since, presumably, an economic holding also makes some profit). If the purpose of agricultural subsidy is to optimise food production, it should be paid only on food actually produced. Otherwise, it is simply a subsidy of the rich, paid for out of the taxes on the poor. And that is necessarily iniquitous.

Tax on private land ownership

Land ownership is a good. It is a good which is in short supply. It is a good which cannot easily be distributed equitably. And every hectare of land which is held privately is a hectare whose use is not optimised to the public good; it is, in a real sense, a cost to the community. It is normal for goods which cannot be distributed equitably and whose use imposes a cost on the community to be taxed, to recompense the community for that loss of amenity and cost. Land should be no different. Land should be taxed.

Other people will argue the benefits of a land value tax. A land value tax would be better than no land tax at all, but it is not what I wish to argue for. I wish to argue for a flat land tax.

The flat land tax: outline

The flat land tax would be a tax imposed uniformly on every hectare of privately held land within a region, where that region might be one of the current local government areas, or might be the whole of Scotland. The rate at which it was set would decided at the level of that region. Every land owner would be required to pay, annually, an amount equal to the rate of tax multiplied by the number of hectares held. If a landowner was unable to pay, or chose not to pay, the tax on any area of land, that land would revert to common. The liability for payment of the flat land tax would be on the owner, not the tenant, of the land.

Land tax would be collected regionally, but would be paid to existing community councils. Common land would be administered by existing community councils for common amenity, or, if the relevant community council chose not to administer it, by a Common Lands Factor appointed by the state.

I envisage the flat land tax being in the region of ten or twenty pounds per hectare, at current rates. It should not be sufficient to deter productive agriculture, but should be sufficient to deter very large holdings of unproductive land.

The flat land tax: merits

Much land in Scotland is agriculturally productive. It would be economically sensible to pay the land tax on productive land, so this land would remain in private ownership and would continue to be farmed. But much land in Scotland is marginal or unproductive. Our hill lands are a grossly degraded environment, largely as a result of over-grazing by subsidised sheep or by deer or grouse kept for the blood-sports of the rich. This land has a very low return, and consequently a flat land tax would effectively price it out or private ownership.

This means that marginal land would return to communal ownership. Of course the community might decide to use it as common grazing, in which case their local landscape would continue to erode and degrade. But they might equally decide to allow tree cover to return, either by benign neglect or by positive intervention, thus improving the quality and ultimately the productiveness of the land. Or they might choose to manage it for specific community amenity purposes, for example to attract tourism or other economic activity. In any case, it's there choice: local democracy at work.

At the same time small holdings ('crofts') could be encouraged by allowing each adult an allowance, say of ten hectares, on which they would not be taxed.

The flat land tax would also be very cheap and simple to collect. The land registry means that who owns how much land is unambiguous. Because the flat tax takes no account of improvements or of market value or of land quality, it is unambiguous how much tax should be paid. Finally, because in default of payment ownership of the land ceases, landowners who wished to maintain their holding would be highly motivated to ensure the proper tax was paid.

A digression: the exponential land tax

A variation on the flat land tax which I would personally prefer, but for which I do not believe it would be possible at present to build a democratic majority, would be the exponential land tax. Under this tax, a land owner would pay one penny on the first hectare of his holding, two pence on the second hectare, four pence on the third, eight on the fourth, and so on. This eminently reasonable scheme would see tax of about ten million pounds on the thirtieth hectare. As before, land on which tax was not paid would revert to common. Such a tax would drive rentier landowners, and private sporting estates, out of Scotland in a decade. Obviously the starting point and scaling factor could be adjusted, but the principle that larger holdings should be taxed more seems to me socially beneficial.

Communities in south western Scotland

Auchencairn

Much has been made of the depopulation and social disruption that has afflicted the 'crofting areas' - the Highlands and Islands. I do not wish to minimise that in the least. But depopulation and social disruption has affected areas of Galloway on an equally devastating scale. My home village of Auchencairn had, in the 1880 census, around 2400 inhabitants; it now has 180. That raw figure sounds devastating, and it is; but the truth is worse. Of the eighty or so stone built houses which make up the core of the village, only three are now occupied by people born in the village, and they are all in their seventies and eighties. The price of even a modest house is now of the order of quarter of a million pounds, and local wages are depressed. So it simply isn't possible for people earning their living in the local economy to buy a house.

The reason for this is that people retiring from the cities, with the proceeds of selling an urban house, can outbid local people, and have done so. Most of these people are resident - only about 10% of houses stand empty - and many of them make a positive contribution to the community. But nevertheless their interests are different from the interests of people who need to earn a living in the local economy, and that does skew communal decision making away from economic development.

Furthermore, with the local private housing monopolised by incomers, what 'native' - second or third generation, or more - villagers remain are coralled into a bantustan of 'social housing' on the other side of the burn, leading to a community divided between white settlers in the increasingly gentrified village and natives in the social housing. This is not a good thing.

And finally, it's even worse than that. The people of my generation born in the village who remain in the village are the children of farmers who inherited the family farm, and those families who have subsisted largely on social benefits, and who therefore qualify for social housing. There's virtually no-one in between. Everyone else went away to university and never came back. There are no jobs for them, and there is no housing they can afford.

I'm painting a bleak picture. Driving through, you'd see a pretty village, and a vibrant village, with its own newly built, community owned post office, with its recently renovated village hall, with its generally well kept and pretty houses. It's true that, by comparison with many other villages in Galloway, Auchencairn is doing well. Nevertheless, my picture is true, and it is a picture of depopulation and social disruption every bit as bad as that experienced in the West Highlands. It's just less visible.

On the size of holdings

We've developed a rural economy in southern Scotland comprising a relatively small number of relatively large agricultural holdings, and more or less nothing else. There are few small rural workshops for craft, small manufacturing, and so on; very few rural offices for office based employment of any kind. Planning policy strongly opposes the establishment of small manufacturies in rural areas. This contrasts sharply with southern Germany, for example, where small agriculture and small but often high value manufacturing are intimately interwoven. Few German farmers expect to make the whole of their family's income from the land. Instead, they expect to work a shift in a factory or other local business as part of their daily cycle. In Scotland, farmers expect to be just farmers. That's partly why there are relatively few of them. It's also partly why there's little other rural enterprise which can employ anyone else.

Even on good land in southern Scotland, a holding of around fifty hectares is the minimum needed to provide the income to sustain a family. Most holdings are much larger. Consequently, population is highly dispersed. The issues discussed earlier in this document, of incomers with little direct involvement in the rural economy taking over the majority of the non-farm private housing stock, exacerbates this problem. Community cohesion is greatly eroded, and in many parts of the south, simply broken.

Policy on holding size can have to rational public policy objectives. It can be to maximise food production. Or it can be to sustain rural communities. Presently, it does neither.

The merits of smaller holdings

Where holdings are smaller, the same area of land sustains more families. So the density of population is higher, and casual social contact is greater. Small holders need to co-operate with one another, because a single small holding cannot provide the capital to maintain one of every sort of machine and tool required to work the land; they necessarily have to co-operate and share. Moreover, if people live on holdings which are marginal or less than marginal in terms of agricultural income, they must needs engage in other, non-agricultural work - which means they will develop other small enterprises in the locality (if the planning regulations allow them to), potentially providing additional employment.

Conclusion

The Land Reform Act 2003 is still one of the landmark achievements of our restored parliament. It's still one of the things which makes me proud to be Scots. It has made public access to the land much easier, and that's a very good thing - a thing to be proud of. But, except in the crofting areas, it has not done much for public engagement with the land. For people in Scotland - even for people in rural Scotland - the land is something from which they are more or less alienated. It belongs to others, to the few, to - almost by definition - the very rich. Others - the few - decide how it will be managed, what crops will be planted, what buildings and tracks constructed, what mines dug, what trees felled, what pesticides and fertilisers used.

This is not, in the long term, sustainable. The land needs the engagement of its people; the people need engagement with their land.

Private ownership of land needs to be understood as a bargain struck between the owner and the community on the basis that the owner can add real value to the land, and return some share of that value to the community. The default position - the position to which land should return when no land owner can make real commercial use of land - should be that land is common, held by and for the benefit of the community as a whole.

And the public subsidy of the rich, paid out of the taxes on the poor simply because the rich own the land, must just stop.

On the cost of housing

Graph shows rise of average UK house price 1986-2013. Source: Office of National Statistics

I've blogged a fair bit about this house as structure, and, by implication at least, as therapy. Now that it is finished, it's time to talk about it as politics. Housing, in this world, is intensely political. We're currently going through an extremely severe period of political turbulence caused mainly by unsustainable housing debt, both in the US and in Europe - in the UK, in Eire, Spain, Greece... Houses, we hear, are expensive. So expensive that ordinary people can afford them only by taking out enormous loans, which consume the overwhelming majority of their disposable incomes for most of their adult lives. Just yesterday, the Westminster government announced a scheme to allow people to borrow up to 95% of a quarter of a million pound price, in order to 'stimulate the building industry' and 'help people into the housing market'.

And it seems to be true; it seems houses do cost that much. Of the houses currently for sale in my home village, only one, a tiny upper flat, is offered at an asking price below a quarter of a million...

Yet the main structure of this house cost less than £4,000. At £6,000 it was comfortable, habitable. Now, admittedly, I have spent more - my off-grid electrical installation has cost £4,500, for example - but that's not a cost the average home has to find. Again, admittedly, it's not a big house. It has about 22 square metres of floor downstairs, and about eight square metres upstairs, so about thirty all together. But from what I've learned building this house, I seriously believe you could build a comfortable, elegant family home for £10,000. This house has four trusses each with 4.8 metre tie beams; five trusses with six metre tie beams, still at 2.4 metre centres, would give 72 square metres of floor area for substantially less than twice the materials I've used.

On David Cameron's '5% of £250,000' scheme, the purchaser would have to raise twelve and a half thousand pounds deposit, and would then have to pay one thousand six hundred pounds a month every month - in good times and bad, in sickness and in health - for the next twenty-five years - assuming interest rates didn't rise above their present historic low. And yet, I'm arguing that a family home can be built for just that deposit. What's going on here? How can such different estimations of the cost of housing both be right?

Artificial scarcity

In the software industry we're familiar with the concept of 'artificial scarcity'. In the Internet age, the real cost of reproduction of a digital asset - be it a movie, a musical recording, an image or a software package - is essentially nil. Once the cost of production is covered, the producers can afford freely to gift a copy of their product to every single person on the planet - as Linus Torvalds, and many other producers of open source software, have proved by doing so. Digital goods are, in essence, too cheap to meter. Yet you can't get a copy of Microsoft Word, or Pulp Fiction, or Dark Side of the Moon for free. The producers want you to pay a high price for a copy of something that is in principle infinitely abundant. Markets - those free markets which conservative political theorists believe to be self regulating and infallibly wise - don't work like that. If something is infinitely abundant, its price drops to zero. In order to maintain a price above the material cost of reproduction, the producers have to make their goods artificially scarce. They do this by means of a law, copyright, which prevents people from copying their work. You can argue about the merits of copyright as you will; it isn't what's at issue here. What's at issue is that the law is used to make things artificially scarce, and this has the effect of raising the price that can be charged above the natural market price.

The primary law which makes housing artificially scarce is planning law. A house cannot be built, legally, without planning consent. Planning consent is often hard to get, and thus the value of land which has planning consent is enormously inflated. I've ignored the price of the land in stating the cost of my house. The land cost £40,000. But there's ten acres of it. If I were to build houses on it at a modest density of four to the acre, the cost of the land would be a very reasonable one thousand pounds per house, still leaving the total cost of a family home below Mr Cameron's notional deposit. But here's the rub: I don't have planning consent. This house does not legally exist, and I could, at any moment, be ordered to demolish it. Land in this village with planning consent is currently on the market for £70,000 for a quarter acre plot. That means, in effect, that the value multiplier created by the artificial scarcity in housing land is 2800%: land with planning permission sells for twenty eight times as much as land - good land - without. I'm not saying that planning law is without merit any more than I'm saying copyright law is without it, but I am pointing out one of its unintended - and desparately damaging - consequences.

There's another consequence of expensive housing about whose merit one can argue, but which undoubtedly raises the price even further. If people are going to have to borrow for twenty-five or thirty years to buy a house, then the lender has to be confident that the asset is going to retain its value as collateral over that time. Which means we are required by law to build houses with a design life of at least sixty years; and that means building conservatively, with tried and tested methods. This house is experimental in several ways, but one of those ways is that it is by design and intention bio-degradable; I'll write about this later in an essay on the house as philosophical object. But, briefly, without maintenance it will rot away - apart from the glass - into the natural materials of field and forest from which it was built. It has a design life, I'd say, of thirty years, although with reasonable maintenance I see no reason why it should not last very much longer. If housing is cheap and bio-degradable, then houses can be treated as disposable: they can be rebuilt at need at little economic or environmental cost. But our present building regulations, written in large part to protect lenders' collateral, prevent people taking this light-hearted approach to dwellings.

Qui bono?

So if we have what amounts to a conspiracy to inflate the price of housing, qui, as they say, bono? To understand the answer, one needs to look at the history of the speculative bubble in housing. Over the past half century, the price of housing has risen considerably above the rate of inflation. Which means that everyone who has owned a - legal - home has seen a windfall profit, a profit which has come directly out of the speculative bubble. And people are naturally inclined to project the past into the future. House prices have risen, so house prices will go on rising. In fact, we've already reached the natural limit of the bubble. Like any other ponzi scheme, it can go on running only as long as there are new people prepared and able to buy into the scheme, and frankly there no longer are. New entrants into the housing market may wish to join the dance, but they can no longer realistically raise the buy-in price. So house prices cannot rise.

Housing is one of the two products - the other being pensions - that have over the past two generations required most people to hand over most of the money they earn to the 'financial services' industry, and the 'financial services' industry grew very fat and greedy on the proceeds. Note that I'm not claiming that the 'financial services' industry invented planning law, let alone that they did so with malice aforethought. Rather, planning law was created by well meaning people to tackle real problems. If people were allowed to build their own houses wherever they wanted to, some of them would be eyesores. Some of them would impact on other people's views and other people's amenity. If people were allowed to build houses ignoring the building standards, some of them would be dangerous, and some of them would fall down. Planning law and building standards tackle real problems in the real world. But by interfering with the market, they create excess value for someone to hoover up; they create, in effect, a new ecological niche. We tend to call the creatures which move in quickly to exploit new ecological niches 'vermin'. Or 'financial services'.

But if house prices can no longer rise, neither can they be permitted to fall catastrophically. The majority of people in what Ed Milliband so elegantly calls the 'squeezed middle' have their all invested in the bubble and if - when - the bubble bursts they will all be bankrupted. Developments which disturb their willing suspension of disbelief in the prospect for further growth or at least stability of the bubble cannot be permitted. More seriously, when, in 2009, the bubble trembled in the States, 'financial services' institutions round the globe shuddered and fell.

It's one of the features of modern Western democracies that political parties seek their crucial election finance from those people who have surplus wealth, and those who have surplus wealth are by definition those who are profiting from the status quo. Which, in both Britain and the States these days, largely means the financial services industry. So it's little surprise that when 'financial services' institutions shudder and fall, our politicians, whom we elected with their money, choose to use our money to bail them out. A financial meltdown, we're told, is too appalling to contemplate  And the problem is, in the short term at any rate, that's true. If banks crash, if currencies crash, it becomes impossible for every other business in the economy to transact their business, because our economy is built on exchanges of value, on quid pro quo, where the quid is vectored through the banking system.

So the 'financial services' industry cannot be allowed to collapse. Yet that industry depends in large part on the tithe of mortgage charges it levies on householders, which enable those householders to have and to hold houses purchased at artificially inflated prices. If - when - the bubble bursts, those householders will be bankrupted. If - when - those householders are bankrupted, they will cease to pay their tithe to the 'financial services' industry, and the 'financial services' industry will be bankrupted. And that must not be allowed to happen.

Adversus Haereses

You think I've come a long way from my modest little house on top of my hill, don't you?

I haven't.

This modest little house on top of the hill is the concrete exemplar of a disruptive, a revolutionary, idea. The idea that you can build your own dwelling, yourself, now, at a cost that will not require you to borrow any significant sum. That idea is heretical, because if the young people who ought to be taking out David Cameron's quarter of a million pound mortgages hear it and heed it, they'll stop taking out quarter million pound mortgages. They'll stop buying houses, and start making their own. Which means that housing will no longer be scarce. Which means that the market price of housing will drop - as it naturally must - to the cost of production. Which means that people who bought houses on borrowed money at artificially inflated prices won't be able to sell them at artificially inflated prices. Which means they're bankrupt. Which means the banks are bankrupt. Which means the economy, and the political system as we know it, must collapse.

Heretical ideas must be suppressed. If I stand still alone on my hill and watch the sun going down, I can be ignored and left alone. But if I were foolishly to get up in public space and point out that the emperor has indeed no clothes, the council not only could order me to demolish my modest little house. They'd have to. It is a concrete exemplar of a revolutionary idea, and so - for the good of society, for the good of us all - it must be suppressed.

Or in this case, demolished.

On being mad

I'm mad. It's a fact. A lunatic; a headcase. Insane.

I can own all those terms perfectly comfortably; they form part of my identity. They are part of who I am I am, and on the whole I like being who I am.

But I very much reject the term 'mentally ill'. I'm not ill. I'm well. I'm just a little mad.

I think the analogy between madness and illness is a false one. The claim that it is is, it seems to me, part of a hegemonic claim by the medical profession firstly to expertise and secondly to control. The solution is a medical solution, a solution applicable to illness: drugs. And more drugs to control the side-effects of those first drugs. And so on. I'm not saying those drugs don't have effects: they do. I'm not saying they can't help in the short term: they can. But they aren't the solution: in the long term they rob you of control, and that makes matters worse. They're the wrong solution. They come from the wrong model. You don't catch madness; it isn't infectious.

Living in the Winter Palace, part two

This is (now) a blog (mostly) about building a house. But it's a blog about my life, and my life impacts on building the house. So I'm going to digress briefly; bear with me, it is relevant.

Having spent a great deal of my adolescence in and out of mental hospital, I have an intense dislike of psychiatric drugs. In my adult life, despite three major breakdowns, I'd always refused them; until the autumn of 2010, when, out of desperation, I asked my doctor for anti-depressants. They got me through the crisis of having to sell my home, but I stopped using them as soon as I felt I could. However, in November of 2011 things were worse. I had the shell of my new home up, but I was out of money, and my ability to cope with strangers was almost nil. I again asked my doctor to prescribe anti-depressants. I went, almost inarticulate, to the Citizens' Advice Bureau to ask for help applying for social security benefits; the volunteers there were extremely patient with me, and, in the course of talking to me, asked what I was doing for food. I admitted that I didn't have any, and they gave me a food parcel - including, bless them, food for the cats. I accepted it, gratefully. That's as low as I've ever been. I don't want to go there again; although, having said that, swallowing my pride and going to the Citizens' Advice was a positive step in itself.

I had considered trying to get a job stacking shelves in a supermarket, or something similar; and decided not to, because I thought (and my doctor agreed) that I couldn't cope with it.

And then, completely out of the blue, before the Department of Work and Pensions could even respond to my application, a friend rang up with news of a job in Dumfries which would have been, had I been well, perfect for me: my own skills, my own preferred choice of tools, and a very generous amount of money being offered. My initial thought was that I shouldn't even apply, because if I got the job I would inevitably fail, let my employers down, and further undermine my own self confidence. However, I did apply, and managed, through the interview, to be fairly articulate. I was offered a six month contract. I said I could only work three days a week for the first month, because of finishing my house. That was sort-of true, of course; I was finishing my house. But the real reason was to give myself a more gentle reintroduction to the world of work. I was pretty certain I'd fail.

All through my period of unemployment I'd been scrupulously careful to stay out of overdraft, but now I needed to eat and to be able to put fuel in the car to get to work. So I deliberately used my overdraft. As soon as I'd been working long enough that I was owed sufficient to cover it, I...

OK, so. Manufactured doors and windows come in standard sizes. Patio doors come in a number of standard sizes including eight feet wide by seven feet high. That fact has been built into my design thinking since the original sousterran design. So the portal in the front of this building was made to accommodate a eight foot by seven foot unit. Last November, this portal was closed only by a tarpaulin curtain, and that's how I expected it would remain all winter. I could live with that. But real glass which would let daylight in would be so much better. You can get patio door units framed in uPVC, of course. They're relatively inexpensive. For twice as much, you can get doors framed in 'engineered timber' covered in oak veneer. For twice as much again, you can get doors with real solid oak frames. In an ideal world I would have solid oak; but in early December I used my credit card to buy two enormous luxuries: oak veneered doors, and a steel bathtub, the first significant fruits of my employment.

Having doors to close out the weather was obviously a real improvement; having real glass to let in light, likewise. But for me the bath was equally important. I like to be clean, and, still more, I find long, hot baths relaxing and restoring.

There's a wee design quirk about my bath which pleases me greatly. This is a very small house, and it's a one person house. It was always the plan that the bath would be immediately behind the sink unit. It would, I planned, make the plumbing simpler. Well, or course it would. But it was even simpler than I expected. I had bought the cheapest mixer tap I could get for the kitchen sink, and I'd bought a mixer only because it was cheaper than two separate taps. I didn't know, when I bought it, that it had a swivel mechanism. I didn't think about it. But it does, and, because the bath is immediately behind the sink unit, you can swivel the tap round to fill the bath. It looks like a very clever piece of design, but in fact it's a happy accident.

Straw walls have a number of problems. Firstly - and this was quickly evident - they shed straw and dust, to the extent that particles of straw get into everything. Also - in a house heated by a wood stove and lit by lanterns and candles - they're vulnerable to fire. So it's necessary to seal them. The most usual way to seal them is with a lime mortar (lime, not cement, because a cement mortar seals any damp in and the bales can rot inside the mortar seal). But a cheaper alternative is clay, and because when I started on the walls the budget was extremely tight, I'd decided to use clay. It took a very long time to arrive, because through most of the winter the ground was too soft and wet to get a heavily laden trailer over the hill; but in early February we had a few days of hard frost, and Angus, who'd dug the clay for me, was able to deliver it.

I'd thought of a number of things to do to get the clay on the walls. I'd planned a big tub in which the clay could be trampled with water to get it soft enough and even in texture. I'd bought a number of different floats and trowels to apply it with. Some people had advised me to take a hedge trimmer or even a chainsaw to the walls to get them as flat as possible. In the end none of these things proved necessary. The best way to get the clay into the walls proved to be just to push it in with your hands; and the clay proved to be naturally fairly homogenous and plastic. By the end of February - which is to say this last week - the clay on the interior walls was complete. It's now drying; once it's dry, it will get a coat of limewash, and then I can (at last) move my furniture in. Claying the walls was an intensely dirty job, and it was inevitable that the floor got extremely dirty. I thought it unlikely that I'd be able to clean it up again without sanding it off, but to my surprise and delight a bit of work with a mop got it back to good condition. Let's hear it for the old school floor! It always was my intention at some stage in the future to sand off the floor and oil it, but to do that would be to lose its arcane pattern of randomised gym lines; I'm now thinking I may just use polish on it.

Of course, claying the interior walls was not all I achieved in February: I now have a proper back window, not quite as posh as my front window but still a great improvement over polythene. My bedroom walls are now panelled on the inside. Although I don't yet have my wind turbine and consequently don't yet have electricity, I've nearly completed the wiring. I've floored the storage areas in the eaves. But it is the clay that's made the biggest difference: with the walls rendered and the floor clean, the winter palace feels much less like a building site and much more like a home.

I'm not yet finished. The next priority is the wind turbine; after that, I need some finish for the clay walls that will make them less dusty. But then - by the end of March, I hope - the interior will be substantially done, and I shall be able to move my furniture in. That will be a milestone. There are other milestones beyond that - glazing for the front gable, the render of the outside walls, a more salubrious lavatory - but having my furniture, my books, my computer once again in my home will be a step change in my comfort, and will mark, clearly, the beginning of the end of what has been a very tough couple of years. Life is getting better, and will soon, with any reasonable sort of luck, be good.

This job, of course, may not last for ever; my present contract lasts only until May. But by May I shall have earned enough to make this house extremely comfortable, to fence my land, to plant some more trees, possibly to buy myself some cattle, and to put some aside to pay my taxes and to live on through the summer; so if my contract isn't renewed it's no tragedy. Furthermore, if my contract is not renewed, I've regained confidence in my ability to hold down a job, and do it reasonably well.

So, to go back to the beginning: in the beginning, I was not coping. I was, in strict medical terms, insane. Am I now sane? As I've said before, I'm not really persuaded by modern psychiatry's account of mental illness. All human life is ultimately performance, and the psychiatrist's art borrows much from ornithology and from drama criticism. If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it's a duck; if you can give a convincing performance, over an extended period, of sanity, you're sane. I'm still the same person I was with the same vulnerabilities and weaknesses, but over the past couple of months I've performed consistently well enough to not worry my colleagues - and, more significantly, to earn my not inconsiderable wage. Of course, it helps that they don't know me well enough to know how much less well than my best I'm performing. But the very fact that I'm able to give a convincing performance of coping raises my self confidence and makes it easier for me to cope, and consequently my performance is improving. Furthermore, to have got through the dark of the year with improving performance is an achievement in itself, and that, too, increases my self confidence. The anti-depressants? I stopped taking them at Christmas. I have, as I mentioned before, an intense dislike of psychiatric drugs.

Living in the Winter Palace, part one

It's a long time - four and a half months - since I last blogged about this house. Then, it was three walls of raw straw bales covered with the skeleton of a roof covered by tarpaulins. Now, I'm sitting in my bed in my upstairs bedroom, leaning back against the panelled wall. Downstairs, in the kitchen, a kettle sits on the gas hob - it isn't worth lighting the big wood stove to boil a kettle. But when I want a hot, deep bath, the stove will heat it for me in a couple of hours.

Although it's a cold morning outside, the thick insulation in the roof, walls and floor mean I'm cosy here inside. And as I sit here and look around at my home, I know not only that I designed it and planned it, but that every piece of wood, every pipe, every wire in the house was cut and fitted by me. That isn't to say I haven't had help, of course. I've had lots of help. I have wonderful friends. And I'm grateful to them. But this is still, very much, a home-made house: my home made house.

So how did I get from there to here?

The first week after the build weekend, I planked the roof. This was the first of many jobs which I assumed I could not do on my own, and then - of necessity - found I could. The bale walls were obviously very vulnerable to rain, and completing the roof was urgent. The planks run from the ridge to the eaves, and are each 4.3 metres long. Each plank had to be lifted onto the roof, carried along to its place, and nailed securely to th ridge and to each of the four purlins it crosses. More, the breathable membrane had to be laid and stapled onto the purlins first, and the planks laid over and nailed through it.

Some learning, here. First, my initial plan had been to space purlins at 1.2 metres, because that's the width of standard building sheet materials and also the width of a roll of roof insulation. I don't remember why I decided to space at one metre, but I'm jolly glad I did. Moving up and down the roof on purlins spaced at one metre was sometimes acrobatic, but possible. But it was at the limit of my stretch. To have worked, alone, on purlins spaced at 1.2 metres would have been much harder and much less safe.

Second, the strips of breathable membrane were a metre wide. You (obviously) can't step on the membrane when it is stretched, unsupported, over the purlins. You also can't easily reach across a metre of stretched membrane to position and nail a plank. So I learned quickly to stretch and staple down the further half of a strip of membrane, plank over that half, then stretch and staple the near half and plank that; and so on. The last few planks on each side were particularly difficult because there were no longer exposed purlins to stand on, and as a result there's one very untidy plank on the south side... but it's done.

The planks are 150mm wide and are laid in two layers. The planks of the lower layer are laid with 50mm gaps between them, and the planks of the upper layer are laid over these gaps. I'm told this style of roof is traditional in some parts of Russia; I first saw it (and did it!) on the roof of the cruck frame at Taliesin. That roof is eight years old now and very sound, so I thought I'd do the same here.

By the 16th of October I'd completed planking the roof, and the walls were protected from the weather. That night I moved in, and the following morning - my birthday - I woke up in the Winter Palace for the first time.

Insulating the roof didn't go to plan. The first plan had been to lay polythene sheet loosely over the purlins, lay the insulation into the sagging pockets, then lay the membrane over the insulation and plank over that. That didn't work for a number of reasons, and so I next planned to plank the roof and install the insulation felt between the purlins from the underside, and support it with cheap nylon net until I could afford to line the roof.

The insulation I used was glass wool felt. I used it because it was extremely cheap, and I was by then extremely broke. It is both heavy and floppy, and it proved completely impossible to support it between the purlins while I tried to staple up netting to support it. I was very much at the end of my money, and didn't even really have enough to eat, but something had to be done. I had planned, ultimately, to line the roof with matchboarding, which would have looked beautiful - but there was no way I could afford matchboarding, and, in any case, I couldn't see how I would support the glass felt while I got matchboarding up. So I bit a bullet and bought twenty sheets of cheap spruce plywood, at eleven pounds a sheet delivered. Even with the sheet plywood it was tricky getting the insulation up, particularly the top panel of each bay near the ridge, and, indeed, I only got the last panel up last weekend - but I get ahead of myself.

It had always been the plan to reuse the floor from the summer palace as the upstairs floor of the winter palace, so as soon as the outer cladding of the roof was completed and I'd moved my bed and the few pieces of furniture I'd had in the summer palace, I dismantled it, brought it here, and re-erected it. By the end of October I had the outer cladding of the rear gable wall complete, polythene stretched over the window opening, and the wall packed with insulation felt held in place with more of that wonderful breathable membrane. I moved my bed upstairs.

Meantime, a proper stove which could cook and heat water had always been budgetted for. I knew that, no matter how broke I was, the difference it would make to my comfort and morale was worth it. So I'd ordered a very cheap Bulgarian stove, a Plamark-B, which I shall probably blog more about later. It arrived with its chimney at the end of October, and in the first week of November I got it installed and fitted. Raising the chimney was another of those jobs I thought I couldn't do alone, and then, perforce, found I could. Obviously, a stove with a back boiler can't be lit without basic plumbing, and it took me until mid-November to get that installed.

At that point, I had four straw walls, a good roof, and a stove. I could survive the winter. OK, so the front of the building was closed only by some second-hand polythene sheet and a tarpaulin curtain, but it was habitable. I'd got there. I had, indeed, reached the very end of my money, but I'd got there.

I haven't, in these essays, dwelt much on mental illness, but I was still pretty ill, often unable to talk at all with strangers and sometimes unable even to be with friends. Some days I was unable to do anything at all. I was quite unable to cope with dealing with the Department of Work and Pensions, which is why I'd claimed no benefit (to which I would have been entitled). I'd completed the basic structure of my house, so I wasn't, any longer, strictly homeless, but I was literally starving. Things were extremely bad.

And then I had a quite bizarre change of luck - so bizarre that it merits another essay.

State of Play

Roof trusses for the Winter Palace

I last posted here about my life and the state of the farm in May; it's time to post again. It's autumn, and I have now spent five months living in my simple tree house. And actually, that's mostly been good. I've been, over all, much more comfortable than I expected, and the cats have certainly liked it. But the tree house - my 'Summer Palace' - was always only intended to be a temporary structure. I was going to live here until I'd got planning permission to build the house I wanted. Well, I haven't got planning permission - not because it's been refused but because it's all taken much longer than expected.

The summer has been, as you'll know, both wet and cold, but for me it's been a mostly contented time. My home - not just my little shelter, but my wood and my whole croft - is exceptionally beautiful. It's also a very calm and quiet place, except for the one weekend of the year they hold a rock concert just beyond my wall. I've had a good hay harvest, and still have barley standing which I hope to harvest soon.

But summer is ending, and the Summer Palace will not be a pleasant place to spend the winter. So I'm now working on a Winter Palace, a much more comfortable but still temporary dwelling. Because I don't have planning permission, I'm going to build it in my wood where it can't be seen from anyone else's land. As a house it will be small - six metres by four metres inside, with a sleeping loft at one end. But of course the house isn't the whole of my home, because I have so much space outside.

It will have luxuries: things I've missed, this summer. It will have running water. It will have hot running water. It will have - luxury of luxuries - a bath, with hot running water! Being built of straw bales it will be extremely well insulated. And at the centre of it will be a stove which will warm the house and heat the water. Also, having a watertight, weathertight home means I will be able to bring my books - and many other treasures - out of storage. It probably won't have electricity, but I don't miss it much.

I've already completed much of the main joinery for the Winter Palace. The bales are here in the barn. I have two weeks to complete the foundations and gather the last of the materials, and then, on Saturday 8th October, I'm going to hold a party and all my friends will gather to put the house together. I expect we'll get it up in one day, and that I will sleep in it as early as the 9th.

There are things about the Summer Palace I'll miss. I'll miss the airiness and the simplicity; I'll miss the birds in the branches around and the gentle swaying of the trees. I do plan to take the Summer Palace down - partly because it will suffer from winter weather, and partly because I intend to reuse some of the timber. But I think I shall rebuild it next summer, partly as a spare room but also partly as a place to spend summer nights, especially if I have someone special to enjoy those nights with.

Storm

My summer residence is supported on seven spruce trees. In the time I've been here - since early May - the BBC have twice forecast hurricane force winds. The first time, I abandoned ship - but they exaggerated, it was only storm force. This time, I haven't abandoned, and it's now too late to do so. The wind on the hilltop is too high to safely evacuate the cats. I suspect, and hope, that the BBC are exaggerating again, but earlier this morning I described the wind as the second strongest I'd ever experienced. That's no longer true.

It literally is not possible for a grown man to stand upright in the gusts on our hilltop now. I know that, because I've just been there. So I'm going to have to stay put. On the plus side, my wood shows no evidence at all of windfall trees. So far as I can see, no tree of the present generation has ever blown down. And although I have thinned a little, I've been careful to preserve the green edge of the wood - I really think it's wind-firm.

However, the seven trees that support the summer palace are - like all the other trees in the wood - swaying with alarming amplitude, but, of course, with different frequencies. That gives the platform an uncomfortably sharp, unpredictable motion, like a hovercraft in a short chop. I think it's safe enough. The ropes aren't going to break. As I said I don't think the trees will fall; in fact the trees supporting the platform are less likely to go than others, since they are coupled together and thus none of them can sway to the amplitude they would alone.

I've taken down one of the side-walls the summer palace had, to allow the wind to blow through unobstructed. Having less of a sail, I hope, will reduce the risk of damage. I'm still a little concerned about the roof going.

I've pitched my tent a little bit away in the wood so that, if the summer palace becomes uninhabitable, I have somewhere to retreat to... but actually I think the worst I'm risking is seasickness. The worst of the wind is expected to be through by nightfall. I think I'm all right. The cats clearly don't like the conditions and Ivan in particular is clingy, but I think they're OK.

Fenestration

When someone approaches my building, the first thing - and the dominant thing - they're likely to see is the fenestration. That's because pretty much everything else is buried in the hillside; the only face of the structure that's exposed is the south face, which is primarily glass. My intention has always been to use commercial patio door units, because they're mass produced they're far cheaper than any custom unit I can make myself, while having well engineered latches and reasonable insulation.

In the 'sousterrain' design, the shape of the fenestration was to some extent masked by the eyebrow lintels and flying butresses. All the swoopy curves of the exposed concrete structure relieve the industrial regularity of the windows. In my first 'singlespace' drawings, I set the window units back behind the pillars, and thus behind the ring-beam and its braces, and this too masks the shape a bit.

But in reconsidering the front joinery I've considered first that the elements of the frontage are extremely visible, and second that they're exposed to weather. While making the rest of the structure in softwood seems acceptable to me, using oak for the front pillars and lintels will both reduce maintenance and add elegance. Given that it's only five pillars and four lintels, the increased cost is not going to be high. And it you're going to do that, the relatively lightweight 200x50 mm lintels of the front ring beam as originally planned are going to look wrong (and in any case require a lot of additional joinery to make a weatherproof space). Better, I thought, to make them true lintels, with a section of 200x200 mm or possibly even more. Yes, more expensive and not required from an engineering point of view, but the fenestration can now be fitted directly into the aperture between pillars, sill and lintels, completely solving the weatherproofing problem.

The trouble with that is, if the pillars are still roundwood, the only place the windows can now go is between the centres of the pillars, or else you're back to bodging the weatherproofing. Which means you can't easily get well engineered braces in front of them. Mind you, there's no longer an engineering justification for braces - all they're doing is relieving the shape of the aperture. If the windows are to be set futher back into the aperture, the pillars must be sawn wood - but they can be sawn to the angles I want, so that can be a feature. And I can have braces.

And the windows themselves?

OK, let's start with the ideal. If I were a plutocrat James Bond villain, the windows would drop vertically into wells in the floor to open them, and would be closed by hydraulic lifts or something similar. In summer, when the weather is warm and pleasant, I'd like them just not to be there at all. If not a plutocrat but merely very rich, I would have a custom made fold-and-slide door, where there was one continuous track and all the leaves of the left-hand two apertures folded and slid left while all those on the right-hand two folded and slid right. That would achieve almost the same end result - in summer, a clear space open to the outside - although the folded leaves would now intrude into the living space on either side of the single opening.

The whole point of this design, however, is that I'm neither a plutocrat nor rich. I'm poor. As I said to the woman from the planning department, the whole purpose of this proposal is cheap hooses for puir fowk. A single two metre by two metre fold and slide unit in oak veneer - not even real oak - costs of the order of £1,200 ex VAT, so the four of them cost £4,800 ex VAT. Solid oak costs more. That's in a structure which, even with my oak front joinery, has a materials cost for everything else except the front windows of under £7,000.

So, here's the rub. I can halve that cost by using uPVC units. uPVC units come in at £600 per unit, or £2400 for the whole set. But can I really live with uPVC?

Let's go back to the matter of doing things on the cheap. Makers of sealed glazing units often sell units that have been made but which weren't used in the project for which they were made, cheap. This is because once made they can't be refashioned, and if they aren't a standard size then they're pretty much scrap. So you can get cheap units but you're unlikely to get the size you want. Poor self builders often start by buying these cheap units and then making their window apertures to fit the units they've got. I could, and probably should, do this; if I can get units which are almost the right size it might even be worth respacing the pillars a bit to fit them.

However, that means spending out on the fenestration right at the start of the project. I don't want to do that because if I'm going to run out of cash at any stage I want to run out of cash with a weatherproof structure. Window apertures can be made good cheaply with weatherboard (at the cost of no daylight). A bloody great hole in the roof can't be made good cheaply.

But also, I don't, in the end, know how much I've got to spend. The financing of the farm is complicated and not relevant here, but it's possible that in due course I'll get some money back - possibly as much as £20,000, which makes a difference. If I don't get any of it back, then I'm going to have to see what cheap fenestration I can get. If I get a little, then four uPVC units are not a lot of money. If I get more, then I can have oak. But if I get a lot of it back, a custom fold and slide isn't utterly impossible... and it would make a significant difference to the space.

One question that I haven't answered in all this, and which will have to be answered, is... where will the cat-flap go? Penny and Ivan are going to be seriously unamused if there isn't a cat-flap, and I'm going to be seriously unamused if I have to keep getting up and going to open the door for them.

Plan B

Of course Plan A is to get planning permission. Of course Plan A is to live in a proper, legitimate house, pay council tax and have my rubbish collected in bins. But that may not happen. It, actually, may not happen for three reasons. Firstly, and very probably, planning permission may simply be refused. That is actually pretty likely - I probably have less than 50% chance of getting planning permission anyway.

Secondly, planning permission may be granted but it may be granted too late. I must have something considerably more comfortable and weatherproof than the Summer Palace before winter; neither my mental nor my physical health would stand up to a winter spent literally out of doors. So if I haven't got planning permission by mid-July I have to go to plan B anyway.

Thirdly, planning permission may be granted but I may not be able to afford to build to the quality required. This is complicated. In theory one third of what I invested in the farm is loan, to be repaid. It was never likely that it would all be repaid, but I was hoping that half of it would be. This now looks unlikely. If I had got half back, I would have £16,000 to pay for materials for my house, which may sound ludicrously little but actually as self-builders of houses with planning permission can reclaim VAT it's effectively £20,000 and it is - just, barely - enough. But unless I get some of the loan back I have £6,000, and that just isn't.

Of course I could get a mortgage - I do own the croft - but I'd have to get a steady job to repay it, and I really don't want to do that.

So there has to be a plan B, and plan B is about counting assets.

I have several hundred harvestable sitka trees. I have a growing barley crop, and shall have straw by autumn. There is also wool, but asking around I find that unless you treat wool with some fairly nasty insecticide it doesn't make good household insulation.

However, a log cabin is possible using materials I don't have to pay for. If I build a roundwood pole structure with straw bale walls, I need to pay for the render on the walls... at least, in theory I could make it from raw materials, but that's too complex and I don't have time. But the render is affordable. Unless I thatch the roof - which takes skill I don't have, and longer, better quality straw than I'm likely to get - roof insulation also needs to be paid for. In any case, windows, hardware, electrical installation and drainage need to be paid for. It may be, for the first winter, I have to do without electricity all together. It may be, for the first winter, that I have to do without glass.

But a habitable house for £6,000? Yes, I think it can be done.

Building plan for the Winter Palace

If the bothy I'm wryly refering to as the Winter Palace is to be built in one weekend - hopefully in one day - a lot of preparation has to be done first. Let's start with the basics: materials.

The winter palace comprises straw bales, timber, render, insulation and a few other things. It would be elegant if the straw bales came from barley crop and, in theory, they might. But I'm not confident that my barley will be ready to harvest in time, so it would be prudent to get bales from another source. Similarly there would be a lot to be said for using timber from my own wood; in terms of energy and the environment it would be the best solution. But I'm not at all confident we can mill enough timber in time and even if we do it will be horribly unseasoned. So, again, it may be prudent to buy the timber from the builders' merchant.

On the matter of render, the choices are clay or lime. I'll need between two and three cubic metres. Clay will cost the labour of digging it and hauling it on site; lime will cost real money. Lime is the preferred option but may simply be unaffordable.

Tasks to do in advance

Level the rails

The bothy will be built on three oak rails lying on a stone foundation. The foundation is in place now, but not perfectly level. Some components of the rails are cut, but most are not. Getting the rails to site will need, probably, Alex's Unimog. The rails will then need to be assembled on site and levelled. That's a job for probably two people over two days, in dry weather.

Cut hazel rods

The bale walls will effectively be nailed together with hazel rods; I need about one metre of rod per bale, or 130 metres of rods. I could actually do that myself in a couple of days and fetch them back in my car, but it would be easier with two people and a trailer; again, this is a dry weather job. (Update: I've already cut 100 metres of rods)

Dig clay

If I can't afford lime render I'm going to have to dig clay. Three cubic metres is a lot of digging. Also, I can't really haul that back in my car, I'll need to borrow a trailer and something to pull it. Two people, one day, and again dry weather would make it enormously more pleasant. On sober reflection, three cubic metres of water is (obviously) three tons, and clay is substantially heavier than water; so that's quite a large trailer and it probably needs to be a tractor!

Prefabricate sub-assemblies

One of the issues with a straw bale structure is that although bales from the same batch - baled with the same baler on the same day with the same tension settings of straw from the same field - are likely to be consistent in length, you don't know until they're delivered exacly what that length will be. The walls sit on a sill plate and are capped with a wall plate, each of which will be essentially a box structure. The box structures can be prefabricated, but need to be constructed to the maximum likely length and designed to be easily shortened on the day.

The roof is supported by four main trusses. Again, the trusses can be prefabricated. The front and rear trusses will probably eventually have windows in them, and it's possible that the frames for these windows can be prefabricated at the same time.

There will probably be a back door and there will certainly be a front opening. Each of these openings needs to be framed so as to support the walls. The frames can be prefabricated.

All this prefabrication can take place in the Void, so can happen on wet days; but it can't happen until I have timber and I'd estimate that it's at least a week's work.

Lay the floor

The floor can't be laid very long before the main build since it won't benefit from getting wet, but it doesn't need to be laid on the very same day as the rest of the build, provided it can be protected by tarpaulins. Laying the floor is neither hard nor especially time consuming; two people could easily do it in one day and I could easily do it by myself in two.

All that adds up to a fortnight of my time and a few days of other people's time, over a period of six weeks; it shouldn't be impossible.

On the day

On the day I propose to have four teams, Carpentry, Catering, Transport and Walls.

Transport 

The job of the Transport team is obviously to make sure that everything is on site when needed. If we have a spell of settled weather this isn't an issue since everything can be stacked on site in advance. Render can be stacked on site in advance anyway. But otherwise I'll need a tractor or 4x4 with trailer, and one or two people to help load/unload. Until the bale walls are built the Carpentry team can help Transport.

Catering

The job of the catering team is to feed everyone.

Walls

Walls team starts the day by assembling the bale walls onto the sill plates, which should already be in place, and staking the bales with the hazel rods. Apart from the front opening and the rear door there are no holes or other openings in the walls, so this should be very fast - an hour at most. Obviously it's important that they be vertical!

Once the walls are up and the wall plates have been fitted, walls team's job is to apply render. About 2.5cm of render has to be applied to both inside and outside of the walls, all over. However, as rendering is going on the carpentry team will be working on the roof, so some co-operation will be needed, and generally the carpentry team's needs will take priority.

Carpentry

The Carpentry team don't start work until the bale walls are up. Until then, they can help transport team bringing materials to site. Once the walls are up, they install and fit first the wall plates, then the main trusses and their cross-braces, then the inner vapour barrier, then the purlins, then the insulation and the outer vapour barrier. At this point the roof is more or less weatherproof and the walls are protected; if this is as far as we can get that's OK.

However, I'm hoping we can get further. If we have enough carpenters to divide into two teams, one team will be set to cladding while the other is set to lining; if not, cladding comes first, lining happens later, and, indeed, need not happen as part of the build weekend.

If there's time it would be nice to dismantle the summer palace, and to use its wood to construct the bed-loft mezzanine. It would also be nice to have the flue fitted.

Enfin

The object of the weekend is to get main structure up and weatherproof. It isn't intended or expected that to have a completely finished building. Render will have to dry before the interior walls can be painted, and that must be done before furniture can be moved in.

I don't envisage fitting the back door, or panelling or glazing the front opening, as part of the build weekend. This is partly because I will need through draught to dry the clay render, and partly because frankly I haven't a clue yet how I'm going to fill the front opening (although, obviously, as much glazing as possible is essential). The rear gable opening is also intended to be eventually partly glazed, but it may be partly panelled before being erected.

While I shall almost certainly sleep in the new structure on the Sunday night (because the summer palace will very likely no longer exist) I don't expect to be fully moved in until 17th October.

Towards a farming plan for the West Croft

My objective for farming the West Croft is to essentially make as large a contribution to self sufficiency as possible, while minimising cash inputs. I'm not significantly concerned with maximise cash profit, although I can't afford for it to become a major cash drain.

I intent to continue to farm the croft as organic, not so much because I believe in the benefits of organic food but because I want to maximise biodiversity and minimise long-term environmental impact. It's no great advantage to me for the croft to be registered organic, since the difference in profit between certified organic production and uncertified production is unlikely to cover the cost of registration, but if the croft continues to be covered by the Standingstone registration that is in my interests.

These objectives need to be balanced against constraints.

Cropping the croft without fertilising it will lead to impoverishment in nitrates. Also, regular cropping of the same land will lead to a decline in meadow herbage, which is not what I want. Organic fertiliser is expensive, and, from the point of view of a registered organic holding, not permissible as the major source of fertiliser anyway. So I need to maintain pasture under grass/clover with some shit-producing animals as a significant part of what I do. It could easily be all I do...

During years under grass/clover, and particularly with animals, nitrates build up in the soil. During years under crop, the nitrates deplete. Scottish Agricultural College recommends an organic cycle of three years grass/clover, one year cereal, one year roots, one year cereal. This doesn't appeal to me as if I plough up my land three years in succession every six, I'm going to seriously degrade the meadow herbage.

At the same time modern tractors and combines need a lot of turning room. Therefore, economically, I ought to treat my whole croft as one field. But if I do that there's no reservoir on my land for herbage species to recolonise from (there is of course the commons). Also, treating the whole croft as one field means that in any one year I have only one sort of produce, so I'm forced to trade most of it in the cash economy since I'll have more of that product than I need, and will be short of other products which I also need.

Three park strategy

These considerations make me feel that there's merit in a three park plan: to divide my current 2.9 hectares of arable into three roughly equal parcels each of slightly less than one hectare each, with more-or-less permanent fencing between. This means that in any one year I can have all three down to grass/clover, two down to grass/clover and one down to crop, or one down to grass/clover and two down to crop.

If two adjacent parks were down to the same crop in the same year it would be good to be able to remove the fencing between them, but this may be more work than it's worth. If I'm going to have crops, I need to be able to use a tractor from time to time, and given the park sizes it needs to be a small one. It could be mine, or communal, or shared, or contracted in (although contractors rarely have small tractors).

Livestock

I like to eat meat; not a lot of it, but some. Keeping hardy livestock involves little work and helps fertilise the land. Livestock slaughtered and butchered for home consumption require remarkably little bureaucracy and hence, cost. Cattle, sheep and pigs are all possible. However, pigs are particularly hard to fence, and sheep (especially lambs) are fairly hard to fence.

Regardless of species, I could buy weaners in the spring, fatten through the summer and slaughter in the back end, or I could keep my own females and breed from them to produce animals to slaughter.

For cattle a stocking density of two cows (including suckling calves) per hectare is often recommended, with up to three stirks per hectare. Galloway cattle are particularly hardy and low maintenance, and they are, after all, bred for precisely our conditions. A viable strategy would be to have two parks as pasture at any one time; to have two cows, serviced by AI each year, and run the calves with their mothers for twenty-four months until slaughter. This would produce an average of two beef carcases per year at around 300Kg live weight, each yielding about 200Kg meat. That's more than twice the meat I need for own use, so one animal could be sold each year.

For shelter, access to part of the wood in winter is probably all Galloways would need, but a small cattle shed would be a good thing.

For sheep, stocking density is about six ewes per hectare, each producing on average two lambs per year, so probably eleven carcases per year at about 30Kg each live weight. This means only one park would need to be devoted to livestock in any one year. The advantage over cattle is more slaughters per year means less meat in storage at any one time, and meat is eaten fresher. Also, it would be possible from an economic and husbandry point of view not to produce much excess. The downside is that slaughter is inevitably a pretty grisly and horrible job, but doing it more often would get one accustomed, I suppose. If I kept just one park of sheep I could put one park down to hay each year, which could be a cash crop.

Sheep wouldn't strictly need shelter and definitely shouldn't be allowed into the wood, but a small shed would nevertheless be useful for lambing.

Crops

The SAC states that the average yield for oats in Scotland is 5.92 tons per hectare, but that's assuming conventional production; if I half that to around three tons/park (given I have organic production and that my parks are shy of one hectare) that's a reasonable target. Thus if I grow one park of oats every two years, that gives me

250Kg own use for two years (I currently consume about 0.5Kg of oats a week, but if I baked oaten bread or oatcakes could easily increase that)
175Kg reserved as seed for next planting
2500Kg available as cattle feed or to sell

To have oats in my rotation requires that I have a granary capable of holding at least 3 tons of oats (5 tons capacity would be better given that I may be being overly pessimistic on yield), and a means of hulling and rolling small quantities of oats at a time.

As to root crops, the obvious one is potatoes. The trouble is I don't actually much like potatoes. Also, mechanically harvesting one hectare of potatoes is almost certainly uneconomic, and manually harvesting a hectare of potatoes is a lot of work. Onions seem to be doing reasonably well for me this year despite neglect; the parsnips I planted this year seem entirely to have succumbed to slugs. If I add roots to my rotation, it seems to me best to divide a park into strips of early, main-crop and late potatoes, onions, and possibly brassica roots such as swedes or parsnips. This means that they won't all come ready for harvest at the same time, spreading the labour of manual harvest over several months. It would be possible to have strips of green brassicas (cabbage, chard, etc), courgettes and peas in the same park since potatoes and brassica root crops will need regular tending for slugs and weeds anyway, so the additional work would be low.

You can't reasonably store root crops over two years, and I can't afford to devote one park a year to roots, so I'd need to sell surplus production in producing years and buy in non-producing years - possibly in an arrangement with another Standingstone croft.

Summary

At present my feeling is that my best plan would be to divide my croft into three parks and to seek to buy two Galloway heifers in calf next spring. I would then run a rotation with each park doing two years pasture, one year oats, one year mixed roots. But I'd be very interested in other people's comments on this plan! This plan assumes that the commons remains permanent meadow (which is the current plan) and thus serves as a seed source and genetic reserve to keep repopulating my parks with meadow herbs ('weeds'); if the commons is not managed as permanent meadow I may need to set one of my parks as permanent meadow, in order to maintain biodiversity. This would mean either that I could not practically keep cattle, or that I could not grow crops.