Chapter Forty-Three - The
Dreadful Place Called Reality
Three of us were sitting in
the caravan in the top field behind Joe's house. I had
been co-opted onto the building team. Joe, his friend
Gerry, and myself were supposed to be working out who was
going to do what work, and how much profit everyone was
going to get when the work was finished.I looked
out of the small window at the goats browsing in the
field. There must have been about two dozen of them. The
ground dropped suddenly away towards the road alongside
which the house had been built. It was a simple small
farmhouse, with three quarters of the building finished,
but with the western end still only half a shell.Further
along the road was a pig farm, across the road a small
field, and a pond where a tiny stream, really no more than
a ditch, had been dammed. Floating on the pond, and
waddling about around the edges was a squad of ducks.It looked
idyllic in one sense. If you are looking for a rural life,
fresh eggs, a goat or two in the freezer, fresh milk every
day, and a relatively tranquil country scene, then this
might well be ideal.Ideal if
the house was finished and rather a lot of tidying up was
done. That was the prime objective for us, to make the
place attractive and easily sellable.I came
back to the fold-down table and looked at my notes. There
was the new kitchen to finish, and all the upstairs rooms
to re-plaster, re-wire, and re-plumb. All the downstair
rooms had to be re-wired and re-plumbed, and then the
whole house had to be painted.The worst
of the work had been done. Gerry was going to finish a dry
stone wall along the front to retain the earth from the
top field. We decided to get in Gerry's next door
neighbour to do the electrical circuits, and Joe was going
to run away to Ireland.Joe
wanted the money but he didn't want to do the work. He
preferred to sit around all day and think. He didn't much
care for manual work. He had ideas about how the world
should be. They were good ideas no doubt, but they
revolved around other people changing the way they did
things; and didn't involve Joe actually doing anything at
all.He would
lay on the sofa, half sitting, half lying, fiddling with a
broken toy, and descant on the evils of modern
civilisation, and how everybody was so thoroughly and
sickeningly materialistic.What he
intended to do about this state of affairs no-one ever
discovered. He was going to write this book. Day after day
he would mention the project. It would be about the
spiritual values of our time, and how they were rotten.
Unfortunately the concept of the book never once went
beyond that simple assertion. Instead, he would park his
backside on a dry stone wall and observe the goats because
it was a sunny day, and he didn't want to do any real
work, like shopping, or cleaning the house, or plastering
a wall, or getting a job. For Joe, sitting staring into
the middle distance was his idea of thinking, and that was
job enough.His
thoughts started with the observation that goats get up,
eat, drink, shit, muck about, eat some more, drink some
more, and have no worries, therefore goats live in a
blissful golden state.The next
stage of the argument went something like this. If goat
can be in this golden state, then so can mankind. There
were no complications, no problems, no side issues, no
careful thought at all about how goats and humans might
possibly be different. I guess at bottom Joe wanted to be
a human goat. What concerned him really was not that the
world was a ghastly materialistic place, but that he might
have to get off his arse to provide some materialistic
things for his growing family. He didn't want to have to
worry about things. Worrying threw him completely. He had
to worry about money, about the local authority building
inspector, about getting materials for the building, about
lifting one block and placing it upon another, and all the
host of hassles that are part of daily life.Sitting
on the wall staring into the middle distance was for Joe
the ideal moral state. The fact that morality didn't come
into the equation at all didn't seem to get through to
him.Sitting
on the wall staring into the middle distance was Joe's way
of planning the book. It represented his way of thinking.
He was getting, not so much the background information for
his treatise, but more the feel of the thing. As far as we
could tell, there wouldn't be any background information,
the whole book would be just feel.There was
Joe's backside firmly wedged on the stones at the top of
the wall. The sun was firmly ensconced in a reasonably
blue sky. There were goats scattered in position in the
middle distance. Gerry, down in the roadway preparing to
start the day's building, wasn't part of the picture.A bellow
came up from the road. "Joe!"But Joe
was thinking, and didn't hear, being attuned instead to
the new ideal goat reality spread before him in the middle
distance. As goats don't bellow, he didn't hear any
bellow.From the
roadway came a mighty roar. The goats went on eating, or
playing the goat, and the one on the wall went on smiling."My god
he's as deaf as a bloody goat," muttered Gerry, and walked
up the hill, and thumped Joe on the back. "Time you got
the cement mixer going."Joe
looked dreamily round and smiled. "Eh?""Start
the bloody cement mixer, and let's get going.""Oh,
yes." He gave a last regretful look at the middle
distance, eased his backside off the wall, and returned to
the dreadful place called reality.He worked
for a few minutes, then stood dreamily in the roadway,
looking across the fields, then worked for a few more
minutes, and eventually went indoors to make a cup of tea
and have a chat. Then he went up to see if the goats were
alright, and sat on the wall staring into the goat reality
until another roar came from the roadway.The bank
manager sent nasty letters about an overdraft, and
inserted insidious questions like "How are you intending
to pay back the loan?"Joe
thought vaguely about mummy, and perhaps about selling
milk, or even breeding goats and selling the meat.While
sitting on the wall he came up with the idea of wandering
about the countryside with his goats, selling their milk
at the villages he passed through. Of course in this ideal
world the weather was always fine, and somewhere in his
kit-bag would be a medical pack, and he would of course
somehow manage to contain the milk and sterilise the
containers. There would naturally be no problem in
preventing the goats from eating the flowers in people's
gardens, and anyway, none of these objections were enough
to overturn the main idea. He'd have a tent, and the
camping gear, and everything one needs, to play the part
of the wandering goat boy, and life would be a moral dream
straight out of Peter Pan.Gerry had
initially been seduced by Joe's ideas of moral freedom. He
was rather confused himself. He'd given up his teaching
job and come to work on the land with Joe. Here things
were closer to the real world. He was escaping from the
artificial world of privilege, social politics and
routines, and was involving himself in the real natural
life.At the
moment Joe was the hero. Joe was going it alone. He was
opting out of a brilliant future in the city, or an
academic future, or something artificial. Instead he was
going to live off the land and make himself self
sufficient and self reliant.Gerry was
serious about it and was prepared to work, and he was
perturbed at Joe's seemingly cavalier attitude to getting
things done. Joe didn't see the new freedom as anything to
do with opting out. In reality, Joe was totally reliant on
other people to support him.As far as
I could see things weren't shaping up too well. * * * * *
If you wish to comment on this chapter, or any part of the book please click on the link below and email me.
I will upload comments within 24 hours, unless you specifically ask me not to, and I will not include your email address, just your first name.
Thanks.