The Moneyless Man (12 page)

Another guy had heard me on the radio a few weeks earlier as he drove along the exact same stretch of road where he’d picked me up. He was fascinated by it all and asked me to come and stay
in his place in Waterford, on the south coast, to help him build his new house. I promised that if I got another chance to come to Ireland within the year, I would take him up on the offer. Everyone I got a ride from was extremely interesting in their own way, each with a story to tell and a great knowledge of their local area. In almost every case, we parted having learned something from each other.

Now that I was home, it was time to think about how to spend an entire Christmas without buying anything at all. My friends like a beer at the quietest times of the year, but at Christmas they move into top gear. This Christmas had an extra edge; my friend Barry was getting married and his bachelor party had been arranged for December 27. This meant – obviously – a huge traditional Irish drinking session was on its way.

In my days with money I was, like almost every other Irishman, one of the first at the bar buying a round for the crew. Given that it was a bachelor party, my Irish instinct was telling me to get everyone a bottle of the best and a double tequila. You can imagine my discomfort at having to go to the bar knowing that I couldn’t even buy myself a drink, let alone the guys. They were great; only I felt a bit off about it all. They tried to fill me with booze, though I repeatedly refused, trying to make a point about the year not being about freeloading. It was a wasted effort. Before I knew it Marty, my best friend since I was about six years old, had put three glasses of organic cider in front of me and told me I could return the favor by giving him a plug on the Gráinne Seoige show. I was bartering drinks for street cred.

My awkwardness increased as the night went on. After the bar, the guys said they would pay my cab fare and Barry said he would pay for me at the nightclub. This I had to draw the line at,
but I couldn’t win. I didn’t want to be freeloading on my friends but I wanted to go and celebrate. In hindsight, I think I took the cowardly option. I went home, putting my desire not to be seen as a freeloader over spending one last night with my friend as a free man.

This wasn’t the first time I’d been in such an awkward social situation; I’d already had a few in Bristol. Whenever I went out with acquaintances, they would start the conversation with ‘am I allowed to buy you a drink?’ When I answered ‘no’, they kept trying and if I finally said ‘yes’, they’d say ‘oh yeah, you won’t buy one but you’ll let me buy one for you!’, and I’d say ‘no thanks’ again. There were few exceptions and although it was always done in jest, my over active male ego didn’t really enjoy it. The bachelor party was perhaps the most extreme occasion and the one time I felt I’d made the wrong decision.

Waking up on Christmas Day was odd. I’d been a really good boy all year and was hoping Santa had brought me the latest video games machine, complete with solar panels. But I awoke to an empty stocking. It was completely refreshing; in the past we’d often get each other the most needless and uninteresting things you could imagine, faking our excitement as we unwrapped the layers of wrapping on another pack of socks or an electric foot massager.

All my family are Catholic; my uncle is a priest who does great work in the community, so we always say grace before everyone starts to eat. This is a practice I love, for no other reason than it makes everyone think about where their food comes from. While everyone else had the normal festive feast (turkey, beef and roast potatoes for the main course, swiftly followed by Jello, dessert, custard and cake), I ate my own little, more humble, stash. This was pretty much the same as the dinners I had eaten for the previous four weeks; mainly food I’d brought with me, along with some steamed root vegetables my mom and dad had got
from a local organic farmer. There were plenty of brussels sprouts, so I was more than happy.

I am very lucky to have an understanding family. My relatives bent over backwards to accommodate me, even though I didn’t really need much accommodating. To a lot of families, I would have been the awkward son, always creating hassle, but I was surrounded by loving, supportive people. The great thing about this Christmas was that I got to spend a lot of time with my folks and we had a good time together. In years gone by, I would have been spending a lot of money getting myself a hangover or out at the January sales, doing the stuff you do when you have some disposable income. Having no money forced me to do the simple things. We spent two or three hours every day walking the coast, playing beach tennis or going for a wander through the woods. Other times, we’d sit and talk together or play cards. This was normal in the Ireland of thirty years ago, but is becoming more alien to a country bitten by the Celtic Tiger.

Having a shower in Ireland was challenging. I’d left my solar shower at home, but to be honest I didn’t really care. It wasn’t very useful in the winter, but it did give me a way to sprinkle water over myself, even if it was icy cold. Over here, it looked as if my best option was the Atlantic Ocean but given that it was one of the coldest Christmases in living memory, it wasn’t something I wanted to do every day.

For the first week, I just didn’t wash. Then, because it was coming into a new year, the time of fresh starts, I decided I should polish up my act and so off to the beach I went. It was freezing cold, as you expect at Christmas in Ireland. Getting in was harder than being in. I had to do some exercises first to get warm enough to strip off before sprinting to the sea, where I knew the best course was just to dive straight in. This was easier said than done. The water was up to my rear end before I took the leap. But it was surprisingly good and much more invigorating than a hot
shower. The water felt amazingly clean on my skin and the sun was shining down from a blue sky, doing its best to negate the chilly westerly breeze. The surrounding green hills and mountains converged to the beach. I could not imagine a more picturesque, beautiful bathtub. It was cold and it wasn’t very convenient but the setting, and the feeling of being with nature, more than made up for it. I think we have swapped the experience of being exposed to the elements for comfort. We have, in the words of Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, become ‘comfortably numb’.

Not buying something, regardless of how much healthier it is for your body, is not very good for the economy. You’ll never see a magazine advertise this approach; you’ll see a model you could one day look like, if you only buy the product that they hold between their palms. Years of multi-million-dollar-backed propaganda is hard to delete from people’s minds. When I told people I only washed once a week in winter, without soap, they did the thing where they scrunched their faces, said ‘ooohhh’ and asked me ‘don’t you feel dirty and smelly?’ I’d explain how soap was completely unnecessary, but it would fall on shocked ears.

My other piece of advice, if you don’t want to use soap or wash so often, is to eat organically-produced, fresh, vegan food. Sweat is little more than salty water if you are healthy; if you put trash in your body, you must expect to come out smelling like it. Since giving up both meat and dairy foods (both especially bad at causing this effect), I’ve found a massive difference in how I naturally smell. Avoid or reduce both if you want to start going without soap. Being vegan has also meant that I don’t need to wash my dishes with detergent, as dish-washing soap is only necessary when you are cleaning dishes that are likely to have bacteria such as salmonella and campylobacter on them. According to the UK’s Food Standards Agency, the rise of
infections of these bacteria is due, in part, to the terrible conditions in which we both house and kill animals.

Consuming as much alcohol as humanly possible is synonymous with December 31 in most of the western world. Indeed, in Ireland, they do not limit it to what is humanly possible.

Until now, New Year’s Eve had gone something like this. Wake up, eat a quick breakfast, phone friends, get to the bar, convince the bartender I am not an undercover cop and start drinking by ten o’clock. That, however, was when I had money. This year, it was going to have to be different. Even the crap bars seemed to charge an entry fee on New Year’s Eve and tickets for the lowliest of nightclubs started at £20 ($30), with drinks at a huge premium. This was irrelevant to me; I couldn’t afford to look at the bartender, let alone ask him for a drink. Even my parents were partying. My friends went out as normal, but to save myself the mental turmoil of the bachelor party, I stayed in. As 2008 became no more, I lay in bed writing the start of this book.

This was a blessing in disguise. For once, I began a new year without feeling like someone had drained every ounce of water from my body, gripped my head in a clamp and repeatedly smacked me on the back of the skull with a rubber mallet. I hit a deserted beach for a stunning early morning walk with my folks,
looking forward to the year ahead instead of wishing somebody would use a rusty saw to disconnect my head from the rest of my body. This, I decided, was how I was going to spend New Year’s Eve from now on, money or no money.

Normally, on New Year’s Day, I would get up and write a list the length of my leg of things I resolved to do (or not do) in the coming year. But what on earth was I going to give up this year that I hadn’t already? There wasn’t much left. Food? Water? Oxygen? Hope? To retain the last, I decided to call off the resolutions: enough was, finally, enough.

Christmas was over before I knew it and I had to make my way back to Bristol. This time, the journey had to be broken, to complete my end of the bargain by talking about my experiences so far on
Seoige
. And a bargain it was for them – I couldn’t accept their cab rides or even their food; it wasn’t vegan, let alone organic or local.

The interview went well, though I sensed Gráinne, the presenter, wasn’t my biggest supporter. This was fair enough and I couldn’t blame her. She’d spent half her life climbing the television ladder to get to the point where she could earn a lot of money. It could have seemed I was saying hers was an unethical way to live. After the pleasantries and the ‘tough’ questions (that I’d heard a million times), Gráinne attempted a question from the left field. ‘You’ve been quoted as saying that if you have £1,000 ($1,500) in the bank and a child in Eritrea dies from starvation, in a way you have some responsibility for that child’s death. Should you not be earning money and giving it to charities in developing countries?’ Gráinne asked with a slight grin. ‘Earning money from, and supporting, a system that keeps these people in poverty in the first place and then gives them some of the profits in the
form of “strings-attached” aid or World Bank and IMF loans is no more ridiculous than Shell or Esso giving Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth $10,000 to help clear up the destruction that they inevitably cause. Would it not be better not to cause the destruction in the first place?’, I replied, quickly followed by ‘But yes, if you insist on earning money and, collectively as a nation, riding on the backs of the less fortunate, you should give as much as you can to charities’.

Seconds after I mentioned the names of two of the world’s major oil companies, both of which advertise on RTE, I sensed Gráinne was receiving instructions through her earpiece from the producer. Suddenly the interview was at an end. My intuition told me that they didn’t appreciate me implying two of their biggest funders behaved in untoward ways and were probably concerned I was getting too political for a nice Tuesday afternoon lifestyle show.

After the interview, it was back to Rosslare to get the ferry home. If I thought I’d got lucky with rides on the way over, the way back was even easier. I sprinted off the ferry to get ahead of the traffic in Fishguard, stuck my thumb out at a place where I wouldn’t normally have bothered and within two minutes I had a ride with a truck driver on his way to Germany. Not only was he going in my direction, he was going within a five-minute walk of my destination! Part of me was disappointed, as it meant that the adventure was coming to an end and I would miss meeting some new people. The other half was delighted; it had been a long journey and I would definitely be in a warm bed for the night.