41>Hutmatters~2

As a young man, I spent most of my time outdoors one summer, working on farms, and sleeping outside or in barns. I felt trapped when I finally went home to four walls.
Ten years of living in small round huts have made conventional houses feel vast and slightly vacant, like unfilled swimming pools.
That's how they feel to me from the outside too : suburban grey space. Acres of dormancy and disconnection. As an angst-ridden teenager, I found the suburbs the scariest place of all.

We get used to our cages.
Planners despair as folk rescued from squalid terraces and rehoused in airy apartments plead to return.
Places become the holders of memory, of the pages of our unfolding roles, so of us.
There is a pioneering gene in us all, a homesteader instinct, that thrives on the making do, and making better.
This has to compete with an army of statutory building requirements, devised to ensure safe housing, but robbing all but the most ingenious or defiant of us of the will to try much more than a few shelves.

Something's Changed.
I think that when "property" prices where always spiralling upwards, they provided a double helix of hope to peoples' endeavours to aspire and acquire. Enough heady hope not to consider the hopelessness of anyone left behind in the future.
That's gone or is at least on Hold.

Somewhere to shelter feels like a pretty basic right to me.

It's just grown-up dens really. There's no authority in the world that has the right to take the joy out of life.
Maybe one way to restore the magic is to exclude the concept of permanence, of the dwelling being more than what it is at that moment in our lives, for our purpose. Like our bodies.

Look around you at the buildings. We are burying the Earth in our dead shells.

40>Hutmatters ~1

Here I squat, huddled by my stove, the sleet dripping off the trees on my hut's roof. This hut doesn't really allow for much of this weather. I often go to bed early, and lie there, dreaming up newer, cosier designs.
Thermal Mass is what I need. What do I need? Thermal Mass.
Insulation just ain't it.

Of course, it's all totally obvious really: If you choose to spend life outdoors, you tend to like a Bit of Air in your living space anyway, and probably build your new eden based on warm and sunny days.
 Since I started living in huts, doors have always been an optional extra. A curtain or two are so much more convenient. The eaves of a simple shelter need constant wadding to remain draught-proof as rats and birds love examining its possibilities. And so many functions of life happen outside the hut, that the only realistic insulated sanctuary in the end, is bed.
I lie here now, planning new huts. huts with no extra ventilation features. A cosy space that is easy to heat. huts that don't plummet to zero once the stove goes out.

Its cutting edge stuff.
I remember when my friend's house got central heating. I was about eight, and was used to huddling just outside the fireguard cage around our chortling gas fire. to bedrooms full of polar bears and to Anne, my big sister creeping in to steal my hotwater bottle for her own bed. to the wild jagged patterns of jack frost on the bathroom window.

Now automatic domestic heat is a cultural norm. Left unattended all day, the living space can remain warm and welcoming. Remote rooms need not feel made of ice.
Bath-times too had been major weekly events. The heating system had to be cajoled into producing the necessary hot water. Towels warmed.
The spontaneous shower and habitual cleanliness came as part of the great gift of the domestic central heating boiler.

I used to experience the roar of my brothers suburban heating system on visits to London, as part of that Greater Roar, of Heathrow, the M4 : the whole South-East as a great gas hob turned up full-blast.
I have seen that raw energy too, looking upriver from the peaceful moorings of Dale in Pembrokeshire, towards the Oil & Gas refineries in Milford Haven, as they shoot flames into the night sky, like Smaug guarding his horde.
Oil has changed our domestic geography just as radically as it has our civil space.


There's an epic task here, working out which bits of each we transform and which we work out how to fuel differently.

 Cars and Houses.
Both are so embedded in how we behave and have come to value ourselves, that any change is seen as a threat to our Culture's core.

It is going to be fun.