Sources of joy — demonetising

 My mother was a complex woman, from a family with a lot of mental illness. She herself had suicidal depression and was under treatment for it her whole adult life. At the point of her death she was on the max dose she could have, but was still seized with anxiety and terror. But her personality, like everyone's, was many faceted. She also had (I know this sounds incompatible) a sort of casual insouciance — "Oh, it'll be all right," she'd say. And she found much of life funny; she laughed a lot. As well as that she was shrewd and careful (she made some seriously ill-advised decisions toward the end of her life, but I expect many people do), not miserly but never one to overspend.

She loved material things — her furniture and paintings, her clothes and china, her jewellery, her ornaments, her rugs and curtains, pretty much everything in her home, even her handkerchiefs and nightdresses. She loved her car. She liked doing ordinary domestic things — enjoyed driving around rural England buying things and going out for coffee, while she still could.

For all this you need money, and well-judged investment meant she reached old age with plenty of it. 

But it intrigued me that I never saw her look so truly happy as when she gave it away. She gave me and my sister some truly enormous dollops of money in the course of her life, and when she did so I saw more joy in her than anything else ever brought her.

St Paul said the love of money is the root of all evil, and we do well to pay attention to that observation, because it's true.

I personally find money more than useful — necessary. I know there are people who live entirely without money, and I esteem them, but I also notice they depend on the money everyone else has, to create the infrastructure in which they continue to participate. I mean, if you have a bad ankle break, it is money that makes it possible for society to work together with the end result of fixing your ankle — the manufactured and equipped ambulance and paramedics, the pain meds and antibiotics and surgical instruments, the surgeon and nurses and anaesthetist and hospital with its theatre and wards and communication system and lights and kitchen and plumbing and sheets on the beds . . . all these have to come from somewhere, which implies co-operation, and money is like a kind of machine oil that keeps everything working together. Without money, in that scenario, you'd have a lot of pain, you might die of blood loss or infection, and you'd probably have a deformed (and probably painful) foot for life. Even if you were one of the people who lives without money, all that would still be true.

So I don't even try to live without money, but at the same time I try hard to demonetise my life — to give things away, to share, to recycle and upcycle and swap and re-use and make things for myself out of stuff left over.

I have made hats out of dish towels, dresses out of old sheets, a bed base and shelves from a fence we replaced with a hedge that we grew from cuttings from friends' gardens. Our pets have been rescue animals, not bought from breeders. In my room almost nothing was bought from a shop, but made for me with love. I have a chair — a plastic garden chair a lady along the road was throwing out because she no longer wanted it. When I expressed interest she washed it up as good as new and brought it along for me.

I know we all need some money to get by, so I try to buy some things from small family firms — my warm winter cardigans come from the wool of sheep in the Pennine hills spun and knitted and sold by a small firm in Leicestershire. The meat in my shopping basket that will be delivered to my home on Friday comes from this farm in Staffordshire.

But some things — like the bread I'll be toasting for my tea in an hour or so — come from the big supermarket at the end of the road. Although it's a big corporation (Asda) it also has a very benign presence in the community, collecting for the food bank, and allowing schoolchildren to eat free in the café, and helping generously with various community projects. There are two reasons I like to shop there — one is that the products are cheap, which makes my money go further so I have more to give and share; the second reason is that I can walk to it, so I don't have to run a car or even spend money on a bus. 

I believe in walking, and living simply, and owning little, and sharing what we have. 

So, although this may seem contradictory, I both accept the necessity of money and believe in demonetising my life. I think it's all there in that word "currency" — I see it like a stream flowing through the landscape for the nourishment of all the people and animals and plants on its banks (yes, the banks — where we keep a little set aside for the needs of our lives, and for contingencies).

I think security and peace and contentment can flow from having enough money to participate in society — but I think joy comes from demonetising; from giving, sharing, making things yourself, writing your own books and getting together to make music, growing your own food, making friends with wild creatures, gathering food from the hedgerows.