About

Our Downshifting Story in Brief
We moved to Spain in October 1993 having purchased a small and very old country cottage in what was then a fairly unknown and very quiet area of the province of Malaga. I was 41 and my wife was 27. I received a tiny pension from the RAF and a terminal grant. I had a bachelor pad by the sea in Murcia province in Spain and we had a small town house in Dorset. Both were a result of being in comparatively well-paid, steady jobs for years and both had mortgages on them. We had worked out our financing and believed that with beekeeping we could maintain ourselves. If only we had known that we should have doubled or trebled all of our estimates! I went off to do a year’s post grad research at Cardiff University on apiculture and then we moved.
            We went out buying things for our Spanish house including a stone kitchen sink that weighed an enormous amount and a whole heap of other things which we didn’t need. We arrived in Spain with a trailer full of these belongings as well as a Luton van full. We still have much of this stuff 15 years later, still in the original boxes! We didn’t need any of it except immediate essentials such as the cork remover.
            We paid around £20,000 for the cottage which stood on an acre of ground and had been appallingly renovated in an attempt to make it look like a sea side villa. All of the things that really needed doing had been neglected, such as digging the house out from the bank in which it was set to keep the damp out of the walls, and making sure that the plumbing was fully operational. Within a week, the place had flooded due to heavy rains and we realised that we needed to get organised. The house was dug out and the plumbing (some of which required water to flow uphill) replaced. Another loo was put in and the false plasterboard arches and walls in the house removed to reveal beautiful wooden beams and hidden alcoves.
            We did all of this ourselves using by constant reference to the Reader’s Digest DIY manual and turned the property back into the little Spanish country cottage that it was designed to be. Within 18 months, we realised that the amount of land that we had was too small and it was in a very dry area (not good for bees) and the area was rapidly becoming discovered. We sold up and left and were glad because over the next few years, the whole area became filled with villas, and the character of the place changed immeasurably. When we arrived, they still threshed chickpeas on stone circles using donkeys and there was one community phone with a meter on it in an old man’s sitting room. When we left, everyone had phones in their houses, there weren’t any donkeys around and villas were springing up all over the place. Water shortages caused by too many clients for the available water, plus the huge growth in swimming pool numbers, were causing chaos and generally it was becoming a spoilt and overcrowded area of countryside. But we hade made it a very pretty cottage and the new owners, a German couple are still very happy with it to this day.
            We sold it for around £40,000 and we also sold the pad in Murcia and the house in Dorset as the mortgages were becoming impossible to pay. There was a huge dip in the market at the time and so we only e made around £10,000 out of all these sales after expenses etc. Two weeks before we moved, our first daughter was born.
           
            We moved to Cadiz province to take up residence in another semi ruin half way down a cliff side near the castle of Castellar de la Frontera for which we paid around £15000. We had very little land, but we were surrounded by a natural park of thousands of hectares and so our ‘effective garden’ was actually enormous. Included in the price were two other total ruins some distance away – mere piles of stones, but with good views. The area was great for bees and the work was incredibly hard and refreshing. Firstly though, we had to get tons of building materials down the rocks to build and renovate. This we did with a shopping trolley on a cable, thus making a flying fox affair. We could send down 6 breeze blocks or three bags of cement at a time. The worst item to manipulate was sand which we first had to put in buckets before putting them in the trolley. Our first efforts resulted in bags of cement and bricks shooting over the cliff near the house, but we soon got the hang of it and that trolley moved about a hundred tons of materials. It also moved all of our belongings and our day to day shopping as we scrambled down over the rocks. We put in solar power and a wind generator and took water off a distant neighbour by laying a pipe almost a kilometre long. Our reward was a house with views to mountains on one side dotted with white villages, a huge valley stretching out below us to the front where horse riders kept cattle, and views over Gibraltar and Africa to the other side. We could easily see the lights of the African cities at night.
            Our bees produced excellent honey and we sold everything that we produced, and this together with writing articles and the small pension input kept the wolf from the door. But soon we knew that we were growing out of it. We realised that just having great views wasn’t enough for us to keep the property. The house was difficult to reach and with our daughter beginning to crawl all over the place we soon realised the dangers. We found her one day half way up the cliff, determined to reach the road above. After eighteen months we sold the house for $42000 which included the ruins and moved temporarily to an old mill in the middle of a river in Jimena de la Frontera. During a storm we were literally blown out of this and spent an uncomfortable night jumping around on rocks in the flowing waters, picking up our terrified cats and stuffing them into fruit boxes. Many of our possessions including our chemical loo floated off down river and later that day would have passed King Juan Carlos and Prince Andrew who were attending the Ryder Cup golf tournament on the banks of the river several miles away. Our small van was pulled out of the river by a Land Rover and we were on our way again.
            We then purchased a ruined house being used as a goat shed in a (then) remote valley in the north of Huelva province for which we paid around £29,000.   This new property was truly a ruin with one room and a stable attached and a rain water butt, and nothing else. But it was 400 years old with walls a metre thick and it did have 20 acres of mainly fertile land with a stream and waterfall, cork trees, olives and a host of fruit trees. It had been farmed for 42 years by an old man who arrived from his village each day by donkey, and all his produce was removed in the same way and taken to market. All of the locals of course chided us for paying so much for the property. But how much you pay for such an estate in the UK?
 

            Again we had moved to this abode in the October and suffered months of rain coming in through the roof. We were kept awake every night by rats and suffered terribly from mosquitos. (There were no windows). I wrote some articles for a beekeeping magazine in America wearing waterproofs and using a small generator for power and an umbrella tied over the computer to protect it from the rain. A 4Km walk through the mud to the cybercafé followed, to dispatch the article and raise a bit more cash. We washed our clothes, ourselves and our two year old daughter in the stream and used the woods as the loo until we started to get things straight. We made charcoal for heating in winter and BBQs in the summer; we picked and sold chestnuts; we sold cork and we built up our bee stocks until there were too many for our 20 acres. We carried bricks, sand and cement to the ruin through the river by donkey or wheel barrow and began work on the structure of the ruin. We installed solar power, and a spring and ram pump provided us with water. Then we leased another 1600 acres for the organic bee farm. A home designed and built septic tank and the arrival of another daughter completed the set up and over the next eight years we slowly turned the ruin into a lovely farmhouse. We were able to put up with the discomfort because we knew we were improving our situation every single day.
            We gained an income from part time holiday company work, beekeeping, cork production and writing, but finally after 7 years in this house and 13 years in Spain, prolonged drought and a forest fire killed most of our bees and caused us to look elsewhere. We had just spent a fortune on new beekeeping equipment and a new barn. Without the bees which had been destroyed in the fire we had no means of producing the honey to pay the repayments on loans. Then an opportunity in beekeeping in New Zealand presented itself in the form of an ad in a magazine and being flexible downshifters we very reluctantly sold up and left this paradise. We sold the estate for around £210,000, confounding all of the locals including the expats who told us that the place was worth about half that much! By this time however, we were old hands at the game and new exactly how much we could get.  This area too had been ‘discovered’ which meant that rich northern Europeans were wanting the few country properties that were coming on the market in this natural park and so of course the prices were going to be high. It is strange that others couldn’t see this.
            This ‘discovery’ of the area was another of the reasons why we would probably have moved on anyway. The whole agricultural character of the area was changing to one relying more on tourism and foreigner immigration. More and more real estate agents were setting up and aiming their pitch at Northern Europeans, especially the Brits. The area was an official ‘natural park’ where traditional ways and the natural environment were meant to be protected, but the new attitude of officialdom was summed up neatly when I was turned down for a European grant for conversion to organic status, re-equipment and expanding the bee farm, but an aspiring estate agent was given a grant from the same ‘sustainability fund’ for setting up an office and business in town. Again, I had to argue extremely hard to obtain permission to build a barn for the new beekeeping equipment and nearly had the idea turned down, whereas a neighbour readily received permission to build a holiday home on an otherwise building-less piece of farm land which was below the minimum size to build on! The writing was really on the wall. Old farms and estates were being sold for ‘recreational’ purposes and the old boys and their donkeys were gradually disappearing. Their sons in their 4×4s had other, better paid jobs and used the land only as a sideline, and who can blame them. Better pay, better conditions, easier work and they still have the countryside to relax in. Certainly not to farm! But even now, I receive invitations from the main organic association based in Seville to go to meetings to protest about the ’destruction’ of the traditional activities in the park. Sad though we were to leave, it was time, and I’m sure that our departure was an opportunity rather than a defeat.
            In New Zealand we worked in beekeeping for 18 months before the company moved its centre of operations to another area and this together with a temporary bout of ill health made us decide that it was time to move up a gear, simply because we had little alternative and this is a lesson to all that flexibility is one of the down shifter’s most important attributes. We still did not want however to return the whole way to awful bosses, excessive hours for bad pay and short holidays, so as an interim measure Annabel became a part time librarian and we started our own business, Bassdrum Books Ltd which apart from publishing beekeeping and lifestyle non fiction books, also provides editorial services including CVs, reports and proof reading. To this we added a marketing and promotional franchise and I can happily work from home at my own pace. I can go to all of my daughters’ school events, I can indulge in my hobbies of beekeeping and literature and every weekend is with my family and free of worry about the forthcoming Monday morning. I look forward to it.
            One message from that short potted history is that we were able to buy a house and business in New Zealand from a build up of money from property selling in Spain. When the euros were converted to NZ dollars, we found the transaction benefited us enormously. So overall, our activities in Spain kept us alive, but essentially, renovating property made us capital money.
We found that downshifters generally don’t become millionaires through their work, (in fact I don’t know of anyone who has done this) but they can live very well, and throughout their experience they are more or less in charge
            Where it will all end up for us? I’m not sure. We remain flexible and look at any opportunity that presents itself, but the aim is to stay here and build up a sufficient business to enable us to return to Spain on retirement. The Pyrenees sound nice, and I’m certain that it won’t be real retirement.
 

So what have we learnt so far?       

Downshifting is more than just a lifestyle change for most people. It is an adventure in life that teaches us that there is a sustainable alternative to the misery of having a job, boss and lifestyle that you simply don’t want and which are probably slowly ruining your health. As long as you can change your mental approach to life and look at the world and other ideas with new eyes, you too can lead a harder and usually more demanding life full of healthy positive stress.

            Downshifting isn’t, as some would have you think, a means of ‘running away’ from reality. It is quite the opposite. It is a means of joining the real world by maintaining a decent, hardworking, rewarding life that in the main, you can control. This last point is important. You are in control or as in control as you are ever going to be! It takes some getting used to for most downshifters, but when you do get used to it, it is a fantastic feeling.
                        As Anne-Morrow Lindbergh said:
 

‘Only in growth, reform and change, paradoxically enough, is true security to be found’.