![]() ![]() In places the book reads as a lament for the economy of Cornwall, which voted for Brexit because something, anything, had to change.ĭavies’ book lists the economic absurdities that seem to benefit only retirees and the rich: of landowners and their offshore advisers who pay minimal tax and minimum wage of her sister’s family of five who, despite a reliable income, can only afford their own home by renting it out for three months each summer and moving into a tent of the Tory policy of help to buy that used public funds to prop up the ailing housing market (much of which was nevertheless siphoned off into executive bonuses). In the last 20 years, average house prices have grown about seven times faster than the average income of young people – lack of home ownership is now a fact of life for the young: “If food prices had risen as fast as house prices in the years since I came of age, a chicken would cost £51.” Cornwall’s depressed and seasonal economy offers an average full-time income of just £18,000 a year – about a quarter of the income you’d need to get a mortgage on an average house. ![]() The Davies family home was repossessed, her parents’ separation followed she notes bleakly that with this crisis “my childhood ended”. When the indignities of sharing one kitchen and one bathroom with four unrelated adults and a child became overwhelming, Davies packed her van and moved into an old shed near Land’s End – a shed her father once used as his architect’s office before his business went under on Black Wednesday in 1992. If food prices had risen as fast as house prices in the years since I came of age, a chicken would cost £51 Freedom to refuse to do bad things just because they pay well.” There’s something admirable in her refusal to accept the realities of the modern workplace, and willingness to live with the consequences. Freedom to be paid badly to do things well. “The opposite of slavery is freedom, not idleness,” she writes: “Freedom to work, and work hard, on things that matter to me. Davies knew she could have taken a steady, boring, poorly paid job, but doing so would have obliged her to give up many aspects of life that for her, made it worth living. ![]() She’d struggled through her teens and 20s with drug use and eating disorders, but in her 30s was trying to live a different sort of life – one more nourishing for herself and the planet. A box room in an overcrowded Bristol house cost her £400 a month – a sum almost impossible to raise given her irregular income teaching cello and writing music. Davies’s options ran out because of the savagery of the UK’s current housing crisis. ![]()
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