Face Lights Up: 2010

Here is the eco house that Nico is building for his mother. He went on a training course, built himself a wood cabin to live in, and got started. The next door neighbour brings him organic meals and talks about her grandchildren and her great grandchildren and education and other things, makes sure he is alright - and he makes sure she is alright.

The eco hamlet started by accident. A family bought a plot of land to build a house, but when they put in the planning application, the local council changed its mind and inisisted the land be used for a small housing estate or not at all. So the owner divided the land up into 4 plots, and advertised it for people wanting to build ecological houses, with the values that go with it. Voila, eco hamlet is born - smaller garden, more finance for building the house.

When we arrived to visit the site, my first thought was 'this is the way to live'. No fences and burglar alarms, harmonious unsprayed flowers melding one garden into the next, a sense of peace, individual freedom, opportunity for community.

I couldn't believe Nico was doing all the carpentry himself, and he wrote back

'Of course I'm doing it myself - it's like a great big mechano construction. The important thing is to like what you do, the competence to do it follows naturally'.

We lived for one week in house the colour of ripe corn, set in flatish farmland, not far from the Forest of Broceliande in Brittany, where Merlin is rumoured to be living an enchanted life to this day with the
Fairy Vivianne (according to the French version of the tale).

The mud accommodation boasted nothing much in particular: it was built of clay from the garden, painted with home made paint to a special Swedish recipe, it had a highly entertaining dry toilet, and the front door opened onto a humpy hillocky patch of land. We

received organic
visitors, (some with joy, others less so): a chicken which did a splat on the doormat, a toad which enjoyed dark corners, a possy of desperate flies, hornets (living and dead) a mouse and a black cat called Moon.

No special entertainment was laid on, the bikes had rusted up, the bees had died, the bread oven wasn't in action, and we were free to roam according to our fancy: to the swings, to the piano, to the hedgerows, to a quiet place to meditate, to visit the goats, or to play with Matis (boy aged 3).

As this week dre

w to an end we became increasingly uncomfortable about leaving, and when it was time to go, two out of four of us cried, which was particularly strange as the place we were going to was a stylish gite with a view of the sea, a fully functioning water closet and access to a covered swimming pool with wood decking surround.

JC and I argued in the car all the way to the next holiday home and when we got there, it seemed hard and echoey and yet shut in and suffocating, and the people and the restaurants grated on us, and B summed it up before bed time when he announced 'I HATE it here in this grotty dump, everyone is MISERABLE ' and at this his voice trembled into tears and and he wailed 'there are NO SMILES' and took himself to bed.

There is no doubt about it, at the Grange au Son we found Happiness: great big silly golden happiness. I can confirm that all the cliches are true, happiness creeps up on you and is golden and warm.

Bedeviled by

scientific questions such as: 'what is happiness, and why, and how, and can we persuade it to creep up on us more often?', I conducted a formal interview with the members of my family on why they were happy on this holiday.

R said:
Chicken
Goats
Cat
M (boy aged 3)
He refused to be drawn further.

When I asked B he replied:

'I loved everything. Everything was perfect. There was not one thing which displeased me.' and he refused to be drawn further.

JC appreciated the freedom for each person to do as he or she wanted and the time together, and touristical visiting and he saw no need to be drawn fruther. Well it's not much to go on, is it?

So, let's take R's points one by one.

Chicken

Kristell and Nico had 3 chickens, but two of them had developed hot bottoms and had spent the last six months in a darkened shed on an impossible mission to incubate infertile eggs; these were supplied by the one chicken which roamed free and removed each day by the owners. An organic chicken farmer told me they were depressed and should be locked into a box for two days until they were so desperate they changed their ways. Another remedy is to dip their bums in cold water, but our kindhearted hosts couldn't quite bring themselves to do any of those things, and so the strange, and somwhat egg-challenged situation continued.

The free chicken pecked and plucked her way about, climbing over the fence with ease into the lane, hopping back in again, passing in front of our door with one eye out for porridge oats, and then passed again in the other direction, with the other eye out for a piece of banana.
Doc doc

Ah doc doc doc

She always managing to be where we were, doc-doc-ing companiably, settling herself in my deckchair the minute I got out, craning her neck at the picnic table.

R is seen here on one of the rare occasions that another chicken came out, she ha

d a hoarser and more hysterical voice. R somehow taught himself how to hypnotise the chickens (you'll have to ask him how he did it) and pick them up, here he manages two at once.

Other chicken entertainments included gettin

g the chicken to jump for pasta, and training it to sit on his arm like an eagle.

One day, while JC and I were out visiting a sacred spring which had be

en forgotten in a farmer's field (don't ask), the children decided they would prefer stay with Nico and Kristel, and an English girl called Tallulah came round to play. R swaggered about with the chicken on his arm and told Tallulah it was an eagle and threatened to throw it on her head - which he later did (you'll have to ask him why) and there it landed - the screams were impressive apparently. I was a bit worried at this point in R's story, but apparently Tallulah had the time of her life and came back for more the next day.

Cat

Even the cat was sociable and adorable,

e had a round white patch on her chest which inspired her name, Moon. She sat on our car, and in our car, she came to our door, she invited herself in, and was squeezed to our bosom with evident pleasure.

Goats

The

children were invited to feed them milk from a bottle and take them for a walk. Their favourite occupation was suddenly running very fast and leaping and landing on one another's backs, which R decided was just his sort of thing, so he got in the pen with them, although a goat rearing and landing on your back

when you are nine years old is an alarming thing to watch.

M (boy aged 3)

M is busy incubating into a very interesting person. He roams free and plays with sand and mud and stones and grass and water dripping out of pipes and most famously, enjoys peeing in unforeseen places. R enjoyed initiating him into the ways of older boys - dramatic destruction of one's sand-castle, building a sand bus and roaring off on it, football.

Both boys roamed around all day climbing role playing kicking balls playing with M and looking after the animals and generally doing the things which give you grubby scratched legs.

B did manage to sneak one ET (Electronic Thing) with him, but it was soon abandoned in favour of playing the piano (Kristel gives lessons), learning a new drawing technique from an artist we met and drawing anything which inspired him, including the gite and presenting a copy to Kristel and Nico. He taught himself caligraphy (gothic) after a few tips from a local caligrapher, who told us how to make brown ink from walnut cases. He made his own pens from bamboo, sticks and gulls feathers using his pocket knife, and he initiated a pottery candlestick workshop using local clay which they dug themselves.

JC went in search of the lege

nds of King Arthur and Merlin certainly, but it was also the dry toilet which attracted him. It has long been his ambition to own one but I have always resisted saying I would end up being the one one dragging it down two flights of stairs and emptying in a place which was bound to upset the neighbours as if I didn't have enough dross to get through and also enough annoyed neighbours.

We talked a lot about it smelling, we tried to make it smell, we enacting horrible dramatic gestures of appalling stinkiness but in truth, it really

did not smell! It consis

ts of a smooth-sided bucket lined with sawdust, in a box with a wooden loo seat on it. It is vital to cover the offerings with sawdust, seen in a container to the side of the loo. It needs emptying about once every 5 days for a family of 4, and composts down in 2 years. The compost heap does not smell. However, I guess you have to take care that the compost heap does not get access to the water table and infect the entire region with cholera. The organic chicken farmer I chatted to also has dry toilets, his family is happily converted. I asked him what happens when the children have tummy upsets and her replied: 'I don't know, no-one has had a tummy upset since we moved here five years ago'. Anyone who has children in the Paris ''gastro' region will realise this in itself is a miracle. With responsible use, in the country, I am a convert. Although I do think peeing directly on the compost is not a socially acceptable option.
I walked in and breathed in the linseed oil from the terracotta tiles, and sensed the lightness of being from the breathing walls, as if, at last, there was room for my aura. Nico, an ex-philosopher, discovered he loves to build and puts things together using inte

lligence and imagination as much as re-established wisdom. He is now building an

eco house for his mother in an eco hameau. It really can be done, it is really comfortable, and doesn't have to cost much money.

As for me, I enjoyed all of the above and the fact that all enjoyed all of the above, especially the free range children going cold turkey on ETs (electronic things) and blossoming into self-made outdoor activites. I was also particularl

y pleased to have the vintage radio which could play Radio 4 Longwave after a short warm-up. And I loved harvested nature's bounty, blackberries and golden mirabelle plums, and I made a crumble, a tart and some jam which we shared with our hosts. I loved going out with JC without the children and philosophising, and I loved just being together with the children, and I loved the family who owned the gite and they loved us. Nico and Kristel opened up their home and their life to us, shared their pride, their difficulties, their failings with equinamity. Kristel was gently attentive but never intrusive, we were surrounded by her thoughtful gestures and gentle response to the childrens questions and desires. There was no disapproval. Nico sometimes strutted by like the chicken, and was very pleased if we invited him in for a glass of organic cider and a chat about eco-construction. I loved it when B caught the toad in a tea towell and Krystel showed us the grey water filtering system where it perhaps would like to live, and how we followed its progress - right back to our gite, where it wanted to be in the first place. I loved sleeping all four in one loft room clad in contented wood, knowing that the next day dawned freely.

So, wherein lies the happiness?