Thou shalt have

I was at a meeting yesterday to discuss the needs of travelling people – Showpeople, bargees, Romany and other travellers. I learned a great deal. I also observed there were people from a more official background who couldn’t help but suspect that maybe at some level, what travellers really wanted was to settle into bricks and mortar homes and be like everyone else. Happily there were other voices able to point out that these other ways of living matter to people, and that travellers tend to go into bricks and mortar only when no other options are available to them.

We’re supposed to want normal homes, and large ones at that. I’ve seen facebook conversations full of dismay over tiny flats. We’re supposed to want cars and televisions, and then officialdom organises everything around the assumption you have those things. Infrastructure is nightmarish this way. For a rural person with no car, getting to the doctor when you’re too sick to walk a mile to catch a bus, is a serious issue. The pressure to have, to own, to be normal, comes at us from so many angles.

The idea of people who do not want to have, is threatening to many. The great argument that you must want, you must earn more to pay more income tax, to grease the wheels of the country so that we can all have more stuff… it’s a never ending cycle, and all it does is take us deeper into unsustainability.

I’m watching friends whose desire is to have a small patch of land and be self-sufficient. To rent privately without discernible income is almost impossible. To get a mortgage without regular employ is equally tricky, even if you know you can make the money work. Some bod in an office will look at the numbers and pump them through an assessment based on the certainty that you must have a car, some gadgets, a this, a that, £500 worth of insurance for the contents of your freezer, never mind that you don’t even own a freezer…

The subtle ways in which we are funnelled down the same routes, into being similar, fascinate and appal me. Of course the more similar we are, the easier we are to manage. Fewer headaches for the planning department there. Much governmental and organisational stuff requires figuring out who will be wanting what in the future, and of course the more normal we are, the more predictable we are. It’s easier to sell us stuff, make us do things, and plan out what to tell us we want next.
Thou shalt have exactly the same as everyone else in your geographical area and economic bracket, and thou shalt be happy with it. I met a travelling showman yesterday, passionate about his way of life, determined that the system would fit in around him, rather than he and his family being pressured to change in order to fit the system. He made me want to cheer. Conformity may be convenient for some, but it is much more sterile than diversity.

We are told continually, for all kinds of reasons that there is an unavoidable trade-off between security and freedom. You can’t have it both ways, allegedly. That debate always misses out the issue of personal responsibility. And, for that matter, responsibilities held within communities. There is no need to sell our individuality to fit the preferences of corporate and government machines, but the alternative, requires us to take more responsibility for ourselves. That in turn means needing systems that allow us more choice about what we want to be responsible for. Freedom to choose different brands of toothpaste, is not freedom. The freedom to live in the manner of your choosing, be that in a yurt as a goat keeper, on a boat, in a caravan, is a much bigger and more important kind of freedom. The freedom not to own, not to depend on a car, the freedom not to stay still, the freedom not to want to be wealthy.

Green Hair

Look at the list of ingredients of most shampoos and you’ll see a lot of chemical names. I’ll freely admit I don’t know what half of them are. Since my teens, I’ve struggled to find anything that would both get my hair clean, and not result in scalp itching hell. There is also the issue of not wanting to pile potentially hazardous chemicals into the water system.

The substances used in beauty products have all been tested – on animals. That’s a great big ethical discomfort all by itself. It’s also flawed. Short term animal testing does not tell us much about the long term effects of use on humans. It doesn’t tell us what these chemicals are going to do when we mix them up with a whole bunch of other stuff, wash them down the drain and send them off into the water system. There are all kinds of things we know perfectly well are ok in small doses and deadly or damaging with longer exposures. X rays. Chemo therapy. Sunlight. We’ve been assured chemicals used in farming were safe, only to find out years into the real world experiment, that they were killing high level predators. As soon as we wop the ‘science’ label on our beauty products, or anything else, a frightening number of us seem to imagine nothing bad will happen. The truth, as illustrated by thalidomide, organophosphates and other things that have since been banned after first being though fine, is that we the users are where the real scientific research happens. Slowly.

Hair is just one issue amongst many. I’m flagging it up because I appear to have found a good solution. Green, light on chemicals of uncertain effect, no sign of scalp irritation and resulting in clean hair. Having tested this on me for a while, I am reasonably confident in suggesting it.

Just washing with water may get sweat and dust out, but it doesn’t give you much to sort out hair oils. When you first stop using regular shampoo, even if that’s just to move to a milder, greener product you may find you produce a lot of grease. You probably always did. Regular shampoos strip out a lot of oil and thus stimulate oil production. Giving them up means grease.

I spent a lot of time pondering what other creatures do to maintain fur and hair. Licking was straight out. Water I’d already got. What I’d not tried, was a dust bath. Pick a flour you are fine eating. I’m currently using rice because I hate cooking with it, but any fine flour will do. Take pinches and rub it into your hair, thoroughly. This takes a while and gets flour everywhere, just to warn people. Brush it out. The flour combines with the hair grease and off it comes. I like to follow through with a water rinse, because that feels really nice. If you brush the worst of the flour out, you do not then clog up the sink. If you buy organic flour, you’re about as close to green hair as I think it may be possible to get. I have long hair, of a tangly, misbehaving disposition. It comes out smooth, clean, silky and looks good for quite a lot of days post dust bath. It’s slightly more fiddly and messy than regular washing, but uses far less in the way of chemicals, uses far less water than conventional hair washing, costs far less than shampoo and works better than anything else I have tried so far. It’s also a great way of using up flour that is past its best and smells nice, in a ricey sort of way at the moment.

I can’t claim this is fool proof, allergic reaction proof, or absolutely guaranteed to work for everyone. I mention this in case anyone tries to do it to a llama, resulting in terrible consequences and a desire to sue. That should cover me for llama misuse. It works on me, I suspect it will work on other people, I also think if it doesn’t, it probably won’t kill you.