I – Independence

Independence is a much sought after frame of mind. It can induce extreme happiness and well being, however, when you have always worked for organisations, towed the mortgage line and chased the currency of your desire, when you achieve the aforementioned Independence it can lead to lead other emotions.

Like a ship at sail off the coast you have given up the city life, colleagues, confidantes, co-conspirators. You can feel other ‘I’ words;

Isolation & insecurity being two emotions that hit me most on arrival for a new life in North Norfolk. The locals let you know you’re an ‘Incomer’ and that it would be your children’s children’s generation who may be able to call themselves ‘Norfolk’!

Having been out here on the tip of North East Norfolk for six years now my small holiday business and Bed & Breakfast are relatively successful, I don’t employ anyone but do have a strict purchasing policy only using Truly Local services and produce unless there is no alternative.

My allotment allows the above policy to grow, growing produce and flowers that I can use for Barn & Beach gives in itself and sense of Independence (note this is different from self-sufficient) which I don’t think I could ever be. I keep a few chickens and have fresh eggs but am no smallholder, although the more smallholders I meet the more I like the idea.

The independence sought is more a green low carbon footprint kind of independence, I still have guests to please and bills to pay so it is a kind of half way house from true independence of self-sufficiency.

As in the words of John Donne ‘No man is an island’

‘“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less’

As one ‘erudite’ guest announced during breakfast one Norfolk Sunday morning “aye, you now have to live the dream”
never a truer word, I can tell you. Independence.