PRIMAL HEALTH MATTERS

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The 21st Century Hunter Gatherers

An army of middle-class men and women are ditching their wallets, mortgages and worries and opting to live the good life off-grid. Meet Mark Boyle, the 31-year-old business graduate now known as The Moneyless Man.

“There’s something about chopping wood that touches an incredibly ancient part inside us,” says Mark Boyle swinging a large axe double-handed into a log. It looks incredibly satisfying and I’m impatient to have a go myself. The weight of the tool satisfying in my hands, I’m surprised at how natural it feels to swing. I bring the blade down with accuracy and it slices clean through the dry wood, cleaving it neatly into two. It feels good. It feels like being a man.

While the rest of us putrefy at our desks sipping on Starbucks skinny mocha lattes and fretting about double dip recessions and the impending environmental apocalypse, Boyle is taking action. The 31-year-old business and economics graduate from Donegal has spent the last 18 months living in a caravan in the countryside near Bath without money, electricity, gas or running water. He forages and grows his own food and for warmth chops and feeds wood into an old burner. This is off-grid living.

A growing army of middle-class men and women are ditching their wallets, mortgages and worries and opting to live this good life. These brave pioneers have swapped their semis for trailers, restaurants for foraged food and quilted toilet paper for yesterday’s newspaper. They survive thanks to hardened sinews and sharpened instincts and claim to have found true happiness along the way.

“We are entering a post consumer age where owning stuff and being busy and working too hard will seem unfashionable,” says Nick Rosen, author of How To Live Off-Grid. According to the latest figures there are 40,000 off-gridders in the UK and more than 300,000 in the US including actors Ed Begley Junior and Kill Bill star Daryl Hannah. Even The Simpsons got in on the act recently when Homer, fed up with the amount of energy his family used, bought a windmill. “The Simpsons are living intermittently!” he proudly claimed as the wind died down along with his trusted TV.