They’d gone to a Friends of the Earth rally along with “a cheerful group of young people” (the Observer’s words) to highlight the amount of paper London wasted every day. It was 1974, and I was a cute, obedient three year old with blonde hair. A journalist spotted a photo-opportunity and asked if he could snap me on top of the pile, so my parents chivvied me up it.

Little did I know this was just the start of something that would change our entire lives. It may have begun with a bit of innocent recycling, but then it got out of hand. They set out to chuck the rat race altogether and chase the self-sufficiency dream, and we ended up with a small herd of cattle, dozens of chickens, two hives of bees, some feral guinea pigs and an orphaned cat. Oh, and vegetables. Rows and rows of vegetables, plum trees and apple trees, a fruit cage, a huge compost heap, a coal shed, a hay barn, and a lot of nettles. And we squashed it all in, along with our actual house, on a bit of land a third of the size of a football pitch.

That’s what happens when you have a mid-life crisis.

The family legend is that my father’s mid-life crisis started in WH Smith’s on Carlisle railway station. He bought a book called The Costs of Economic Growth, read it on the way back to London, and by the time he arrived in King’s Cross he’d decided to sell the house and chuck his job. It was the early seventies – a lot of people were having self-sufficiency-themed mid-life crises. Nobody had heard of global warming or carbon footprints, but there was still plenty to worry about...pollution, the oil crisis, the population explosion, inflation and the rise in the cost of living...people did a lot of talking about going back to nature and growing their own food. My dad’s decision was a bit inconvenient, because my mum had fairly recently given up work in order to have me. But still; no income, no relevant experience, new family – nothing in that to scare my dad.

Unlike Tom and Barbara in The Good Life, he hadn’t started out with the intention of starting a farm in the back garden. In fact, he hadn’t seen The Good Life – nobody had at that point, because it hadn’t been on telly yet. We came first. Tom and Barbara copied us and the other self-sufficiency nutters, not the other way round. The resemblance was uncanny though.
In the sitcom, Tom Goode hits his forties and suddenly gives up his job in a London advertising firm.
In real life, my dad hit his forties and suddenly gave up his job in a London advertising firm.
In the sitcom, Tom Goode is an incurable optimist who decides to turn his dream of self-sufficiency into a reality.
In real life, my dad… well, I don’t need to spell it out for you.

The Costs of Economic Growth had been the spark that set the whole thing off but his real Bible was a book actually titled Self-Sufficiency. Its author, John Seymour, was a bit of a minor deity among the ecology brigade. You can still get copies of his writing today, but if you’ve never come across them, imagine a gruff, plain-speaking, early seventies version of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. Seymour didn’t mince his words. He would never have recommended keeping a small herd of cows in a garden-sized plot of land, and in fact he’d probably have had something quite cutting to say about people who did. So my dad set out aiming bigger than that. He didn’t just want a few veg and a pint of milk for his efforts, he actually wanted us to be so self-sufficient we’d be making our own electricity. The plan was to buy a watermill which could provide power, and enough land for a proper smallholding.

It was a good plan before we found out how much watermills cost. But more of that later.

Of course, I was only little and if they told me what they were doing, I didn’t pay attention. I couldn’t help noticing when they wanted me to climb recycled paper mountains, but I didn’t pick up any of the talk about moving to the country. We were city people. My mum had grown up in the middle of Bradford and my dad in North London, and they’d ended up South of the River in Wandsworth. We lived in an odd little sixties estate built in a circle around a huge, dominating, solitary redwood tree. As far as I was concerned, the entire world was a city. It really only consisted of Redwoods (see if you can guess why they called it that) and my playgroup, and for raw rugged countryside we had Wimbledon Common. The Common was enormous, quite rural enough for my liking, and of course, quite tidy, as the Wombles had taken all the litter.

Presumably, all this time my dad was out earning things and gradually becoming more and more disillusioned with the capitalist system. Off he’d go each morning before I was awake, and back he’d come each night, and during the day he must have talked to clients, because sometimes he brought us back stuff they’d given him or freebies from ad campaigns. To be honest the main thing I remember him bringing was a gigantic bottle of 4711 cologne, which you can still buy in a smaller version today if you look hard enough for it. It’s still in exactly the same gold and greeny blue packaging. My dad never wore it, but if I had a temperature he’d sprinkle some on a handkerchief and press it to my forehead to cool me down. I don’t think it did any good, but it made me feel loved. It also made me connect men’s cologne with feeling ill, which is an interesting issue to carry into adulthood.