1. In the beginning…
Leon and I are both from Swansea, South Wales and were in school together. He is a year younger than me so we weren’t in the same classes but we had mutual friends in common and when we were kids his family and my family were very close. We never really bothered with each other though apart from the occasional hello when we were out and about. We got together later on in life, we were both a bit lost when we finally connected via Facebook of all places, he wrote one day that he was bored and I answered me too and that was the start of our journey and I can honestly say we’ve never been bored since!
Now we live on a big farm and off the grid in Portugal we rescue animals and are currently surrounded by 17 dogs, 2 ducks, 4 chickens and our recent family members 2 baby female pigs. We keep a blog on Facebook and sometimes update our Instagram page but I wanted somewhere that we could write about our daily life, share pictures, ideas and our life in general with a wider audience so I decided Medium would be the place and then we can share one post to all the other social media outlets that we use. So this post is the beginning of hopefully many more to come. Please follow us and share our posts so that we can reach a wider audience and hopefully raise some funds to help the animals here and us on our journey to secure this farm.
So, how it all started! When we first met I was living in a terraced house in Port Tennant with my dog Bizzy and Leon was living alone in a flat in the Uplands area of Swansea. I had a recycling company which wasn’t doing so well and Leon had his own little business doing maintenance work on properties. My son Conor had left to go to university a few years before so I was pretty much free of responsibilities and I had become really sick of society and wanted to go and live abroad again. I had previously lived in Corfu for a few years but came back to Swansea as my son missed his friends and didn’t really settle over there. From the moment I got back from Corfu I found it really hard to fit back in after spending time in the mountains and away from everything. I found it hard to communicate with most people, they’d talk shit about sports, shopping, tv and things I had zero interest in and I found myself totally lost and dreaming of a different life. I’d become involved in a lot of Facebook groups that were about living an alternative lifestyle and had made friends with an old man called Gareth who had some land down the Gower which is the coastal part of Swansea and a really beautiful place. I would go down three times a week to get away from the city and found myself becoming more and more distant from all parts of civilisation. The land wasn’t well looked after and many people had lived there on and off over the years, there was junk everywhere and Gareth lived in an old caravan covered with a polytunnel, to say he was a little eccentric would be an understatement but he was a really interesting man and I really loved spending time down there, helping him with various jobs and trying to get him to tidy the place up a bit.
I had told Leon of my dreams when we first went for a drink together and he had never heard of this type of lifestyle and wasn’t all that interested in it. I’d been to Portugal a few months before on a reconnaissance trip for my 40th birthday to find a country that I felt at home in and had felt a connection with it although I had no idea how I was going to be able to make the move there. I tried to persuade Leon to come down Gareth’s land with me one day but he had no interest in it whatsoever, he liked relaxing in front of the tv after work and couldn’t understand why I didn’t have a tv in my house. I would spend time down Gareth’s place trying out different ideas like ramming tyres to build an earthship or making paths using bottles, weaving willow and many different things I’d learnt about from my groups. Gareth would always cook something and tell me to move down there, there were tons of old abandoned caravans I could make my home and a metal shed that someone had started to build but I would always say maybe one day, I wasn’t ready to make the move.
Then one day arrived, I saw something that was the final straw of living in the city and I packed up the house, got rid of all my unnecessary possessions and told Leon I was moving down there, he was in disbelief and said I must be crazy but I didn’t care I was going and that was the end of it. I arrived down the land with Bizzy the dog and everything I owned in my jeep. I had a little solar panel which my great friend Patrick came and wired up for me so that I had some power, he also carried tons of really heavy water containers down for me as there was no running water or water sources anywhere near the shed I had chosen to live in. I had started to work on the shed over the last few weeks and had put a floor down using some old wooden panels Gareth had laying around, I’d lined the walls using advertising boards from rugby matches that had come into my recycling company. I found an old log burner that was laying around the land and installed it, I had a little camping stove so I could make some coffee and food. I spent the first day down there making my bed and organising my things so that it felt a little like home. Leon kept calling me and asking if I was ok and I told him I was fine and how I was in my element, he said he would come down to see me the next day but I wasn’t so sure he would, I told him to bring some wellies as it was quite a walk from the road and it was really muddy. I spent the first night there totally relaxed cuddled up with Bizzy and listening to all the sounds of nature. I was in the middle of nowhere but didn’t feel at all afraid just relieved.
I woke up early in the morning and made some coffee, I sat on my doorstep and looked around, there was nothing manmade at all as far as the eye could see, just fields and trees, I felt so happy and relaxed. Leon rang me early and was concerned, I assured him I was fine and had spent a good night there, he told me he was on his way down and I reminded him to wear wellies as the ground was ridiculously wet, he told me to meet him up at the road in ten minutes as he didn’t know how to get to the shed. I was quite surprised as I didn’t think he was serious when he said he’d come down but I finished my coffee put Bizzy on the lead and started to walk up to the road. I saw his little white van coming down the lane and gestured for him to park on the side of the road. I nearly wet myself laughing when he got out of the van as he had two green recycling bags tied around his shoes, he didn’t have any wellies.
We walked down to the shed and Bizzy was elated to see him, he absolutely adored Leon from the moment he met him, Leon had a way with dogs and I’d never seen Bizzy behave like that with anyone before. Leon was a bit culture shocked when he saw the shed but I showed him the solar power and told him I needed to set up a rainwater collection point from the roof as the water Patrick had brought down wouldn’t last long. I told him I needed to fence an area around the shed as there were hundreds of free ranging pigs down the land that belonged to Gareth and Bizzy was going nuts with them. He told me to put the coffee on and immediately got to work, he started to put up the fencing that Gareth had given me, dragged a huge water container to where I wanted to collect the rainwater, went into the woods and collected firewood for the fire, he wasn’t happy with my log burner install so tweaked it and went out to get some clay to temporarily seal it until he could get some proper stuff. I was gobsmacked at how hard he worked and kept plying him with coffee and rolling cigarettes on request. By teatime he had done so much and I couldn’t thank him enough, I made us some food on the camping stove and he lit the fire and told me he was staying for the night, he stayed that night, the next night and all the other nights after that, Leon had become an off the gridder.
My next blog post will be about how our furry family started, here’s a youtube video I’ve made with some pictures of our life up to the point I’ve described above.
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