My daughter was scolding me on the phone this week for living an “unconventional life.” This is the way it goes with parenting. I remember I did pretty much the same thing with my own parents at her age, scolding my father, the actor, for never being around and scolding my mother, the writer, for moving us back and forth from city to country every spring and fall and ruining my formal education. (And she also failed to make me practise the violin, let’s not forget that.)
My daughter’s complaint was understandable. She grew up on a little farm with puppies, kittens, lambs and ducklings to play with, a setting vastly different from where she lives now. She works long hours for a media company in a big city, juggling responsibility for two children in a blended family in a small house with a postage stamp backyard.
“Why couldn’t you live like other people?” she wailed.
The fact was, I did. For 15 years I lived in a tiny apartment in the city, rode the subway to work as a speechwriter in the government and later for a life insurance company. That was a pretty conventional life in those days and I came to dislike it intensely. Then I married a farm girl who helped me cut loose from the 9 to 5 drudgery and strike out as a freelance writer working remotely from a small farm two hours north of the city. It was certainly unconventional at the time and people either thought I was a pioneer or a lunatic. My kids grew up in a petting zoo with both parents always at home, apart from the odd time I would drive away down country to a farm meeting to speak and “make macaroni” as the kids called it.
When I moved up here I was startled to discover that if you take the commute, the meetings and the useless business trips out of your day, you only have to work at your desk for two or three hours to get exactly the same amount accomplished. The rest of the day is free to go on a trip to the farm market with your daughter and pick up a duck.
It is 36 years now since I left the city but I still get a warm feeling when I stand in the orchard on a quiet summer Sunday night and watch the line of headlights on the highway in the distance as people make the trek back to their weekly grind.
The biggest change that the pandemic wrought on our society was to give a lot of people the first opportunity in their adult lives to stop doing what they were doing and stay home. Many of them found they liked the experience so much they decided they didn’t want to go back. And they haven’t. The result is a shortage of everything and long wait lists for the services of a surgeon or a plumber.
My daughter works remotely, which has now become so conventional it is being enshrined as a natural right in union contracts. Makes perfect sense to me. Offices were never very pleasant places to spend the day. Too much anxiety, pressure, stress and when your time is up they give you a short gathering with a store bought cake and some awkward speeches and fire you out the door. Unless you are making a widget or fixing something for another person, there’s no reason anyone needs to go to an office at all. Much better to live on a small farm with puppies and kittens and the other essentials of life and work a few hours a day doing something useful, even if it has nothing to do with food production.
We small farmers used to be dismissed as hippies and dreamers but those days are gone. The culture has come full circle to tell us we are now mainstream and the place most people want to live and work. Conventional farming will soon be the exclusive preserve of hedge funds, drones and AI and produce 90 per cent of everything. Small farms will continue to account for a small proportion of national output but they will also be the place where 90 per cent of the rural population calls home.
Finally, at my advanced age, I feel my work is done. I have led the country forward and paved the way for generations to come. I will accept the thanks of a grateful nation and, while there is still time, turn my attention back to this dusty, old violin that still sits under my desk.