Downsizing

Tracey Smith is evangelical about living simply and sustainably. The founder of National Downshifting week, her mantra is ‘slow down and green up’ and, despite living on less than a tenth of their former income, she maintains that the Smith family is far, far happier now. She tells Jill Shearer how it all began....

‘I didn’t have any experience of growing vegetables or self-sufficiency while I was growing up. I was born and brought up in London where we lived in a maisonette – we didn’t even have a garden. As a child, the only thing I ever grew was mould on cheese!

‘Before we had children Ray and I both had good jobs. We were like a lot of young couples, I guess – we had a mortgage, we went out, we had takeaways, we went on holidays abroad… However much we were both earning, we always seemed to spend it. It wasn’t until the children came along that we really started taking stock. It’s very easy to get swept along with what everyone else is doing, but sometimes you need to kick back.

‘We had three children very close together. I gave up working full-time to do the whole mum thing and Ray was commuting into London where he worked as a telecoms engineer. He would go off to work early in the morning and come home when the kids were in bed – he was hardly seeing anything of them and we were hardly seeing anything of him. I was also becoming very aware of how much financial pressure there was on him to provide for us all.

‘There wasn’t any sudden revelation – I’d never really been much of a material girl. I’d always loved the idea of growing things to eat, I’d always have regular de-clutterings and I tried to be green and recycle as much as possible. We both gradually came to the realisation that the most important thing in life is time – not stuff. Stuff you can always replace, but time you can never get back once it’s gone. We started looking at ways we could cut back and be more resourceful so Ray wouldn’t have to be away from home so much. We decided we wanted to get rid of the mortgage and simplify our lives so we could spend more time together as a family. I’d always fancied the idea of self-sufficiency, so we decided to sell up and move to France where we would be able to afford a house with a bit of land where we could grow things and keep chickens.

‘It wasn’t something we did on a dime – we spent the best part of a year researching the idea and studying French. We cut right back to the absolute basics – you come to realise that you don’t actually use half the stuff you have – and as Ray was giving up his job, we needed to raise as much money as possible, so we sold a lot of our possessions. We were both really excited about the idea. The children were 1, 3 and 4 at the time, so they were very adaptable and just took the whole thing on board as though it was the most natural thing in the world.

‘We chose an area of South-West France – the Lot et Garonne, not far from the town of Agen. We started out by renting a little house with a garden while we were looking around for a place to buy. We had a fabulous four years there. We grew our own vegetables and bought some ex-battery chickens for their eggs – it was a life-changing experience. For me, I think there is nothing better than rearing your own food and cooking it from scratch. Ray was working on fixing up the house and I volunteered in a charity shop. I was doing a lot of writing, too, about sustainable living. I had a column in a French magazine and by this time I had built up a reputation as a green pundit. I had become really passionate about the whole eco way of living, and it was becoming apparent there was a growing interest in the whole business of scaling down and living more sustainably. The same questions were coming up again and again – people were looking for ways they could cut back and scale down. I fully realise that the extreme kind of downshifting we’ve done isn’t necessarily for everyone – we all have our own comfort level, so I decided to set up an awareness campaign which I called National Downshifting Week. By now I was doing quite a bit of work for the BBC and found myself commuting back to the UK on a regular basis, which was beginning to defeat the object of being in France. We thought long and hard before deciding to downshift again and move back to England.

‘We’re now living in a little cottage in rural Somerset. The garden we have now is a lot smaller than the one we had in France, but we’re still managing to grow a lot of our own stuff. Ray has his own business, now – he makes beautiful handcrafted objects out of locally reclaimed oak and salvaged materials that would otherwise be heading for the bin. We’re not totally primitive – we have a TV and a computer and freezer, just like everyone else, but we try as much as we can to live with the seasons and make the most of the abundance of fresh, seasonal produce. Friday night, for example, is pizza night and I make a big batch of dough with the kids and knock together a tomato sauce using tomatoes and herbs from the garden. The connection between the kitchen and the garden is something that’s totally automatic for them now – it’s just so lovely to watch them fighting over who gets to put the tomato sauce on and who gets to sprinkle the cheese on, then we all sit down together to eat a wonderful homemade pizza.’

This year National Downshifting Week is becoming InterNational Downshifting Week and takes place Saturday 19th to Friday 25th April. Visit www.downshiftingweek.com for more details and tips on sustainable living. Ray’s website is www.ecowoodman.co.uk. Tracey can also be heard on her own radio show Slow Down & Green Up on Apple AM every Wednesday between 10am and 1pm, and she’s also a regular contributer on green issues to BBC Radio Somerset. In addition, she’ll be appearing on Channel Five’s It Pays to Watch with Money Saving Expert Martin Lewis on Wednesday May 14th .

Interview by Jill Shearer

[Contacts:] Tracey Smith 01640 30321
Jill Shearer 01249 720807 E-mail Jill