I read Venetia Ansell’s blog with interest because her life is so different to my own. She divides her time between Bangalore and an up-country coffee plantation she has bought with her husband and where they live, rather primitively by my standards.
Here is an extract:
In India, being barefoot has traditionally been the norm in many situations: in the home, in religious or spiritual places, and even in certain shops and classrooms. Unless you can’t afford shoes, or you are on a pilgrimage – and many do undertake annual pilgrimages of hundreds of kilometres barefoot, carrying only the simplest of belongings – you don’t though venture onto the great Indian street without some form of footwear. So when we tried our first barefoot jog in Bangalore a couple of weeks ago, we met with quite a lot of bemused stares. Despite having a poster boy in Milind Soman, barefoot running has not yet pierced the collective consciouness here.
I find even walking barefoot on a pebbly beach uncomfortable but it was not ever thus. James Lees-Milne’s coming of age memoir, Another Self, recounts that he never wore shoes until he was sent to boarding school aged eight.
Venetia is self-sufficient living in the countryside. They have a solar generator, she grows much of their food, there is no running water and so on. Astonishingly Penelope Betjeman in 1973 lived similarly. James Lees-Milne records visiting “her tumbledown hovel near Cussop on the Brecon-Herefordshire border”.
Penelope has no running water, no electric light, no telephone. Water has to be fetched from a neighbour – God knows where there is one – and the lavatory tank must be filled before the plug can be pulled. This operation is restricted to once a day. P doesn’t mind these deficiencies the least bit. She is fearfully bossy. “Now Jim, you are to put the horses in the field. When you have done that I want you to put up an old door so as to prevent the puppies escaping from the stable. Alvide, get the cider from the barrel in the woodshed.” At first one thinks one cannot stand it. But one falls into her ways. She is so good-hearted.
(Ancient as the Hills, Diaries 1973 – 1974)
I have just finished the seventh volume of JL-Ms diaries which takes me up to 1978. Not many of the people he meets are still alive but curiously I met one in Dorset last week. I doubt he knows that he gets a name check.