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Community

The biggest cause of suffering these days is not, as some of you might think, panicking about finishing your 10,000 steps because some wristband barks at you to keep going, even after collapsing. (I always wonder how many people die of strokes because they only did 9,999, lying there on the ground, their little legs still kicking to finish that last step before they croak.) No, the biggest cause of emotional pain in the Western world is loneliness. This feeling of isolation is the main cause of the decline in mental health, which has a direct impact on physical health. It’s like your body is a pinball machine: once the ball of stress shoots out from the flippers, it takes out your immune system and then you’re a welcome mat for the diseases that can kill you. Loneliness is not just some lightweight Elvis song that twangs the heartache of being left out, it is activated in the same part of the brain as physical injury; being side-swiped on Tinder hurts as much as snapping your femur. It probably feels worse, because with a broken leg you might think, ‘I’m such a klutz,’ which is far kinder than thinking, ‘I’m a loser, everybody hates me.’ Research now shows that people who are isolated, on average, have shorter lifespans than those who have a solid social network. The sense of isolation is so agonizing that they say prisoners prefer to have violence inflicted on them over being sent to solitary confinement. So even though we think we want privacy, what we really need is other people.

Why Are We So Lonely?

We are the first species in two million years to disband its own tribes. Families disperse, neighbours hardly know each other and, even though we’re supposed to be the smartest beings on earth, we’ve lost the plot; we’ve lost the point of us and it turns out that the point of us is to mingle.fn1

Robin Dunbar, the evolutionary psychologist, points out that if you are an influencer you could potentially have 5 million friends but still may be the loneliest person of all, having to paint on your own reflection day and night in order to convince the rest of the world you matter. I saw a documentary where a terrified Paris Hilton jack-knifed up from bed each morning, clawing for her phone like it was a syringeful of meth to see if she’d lost any of her 50 million followers while she was sleeping. She was convinced she had such a close affinity to them all. Throughout her day, she watched her ratings like a trader watches his stocks, her self-esteem zigzagging from narcissistic rapture to thoughts of suicide.

Luckily, most of us on the planet still know what it feels like to have a close friend. We ‘feel seen’ in their presence and they see us in all our heiniosity and they still love us. (I made that word up for anyone trying to look it up.) This feeling of ‘being seen’ is now mistaken for being seen on a screen and that is not what I’m talking about. You can only ‘feel seen’ in the flesh because it’s not your looks that evoke emotions (except for the very shallow), it’s the vibe two people create together, or to be more scientific, it’s the hormones you both spurt at each other. When someone makes us feel good and safe, we manufacture oxytocin in our brain and this in turn switches on the mechanism in their brain to brew up their own stash of oxytocin – so now you’re getting high together. If we feel good, people will like us, and the more people like us, the better we feel. Nature really knows how to make a win-win situation work. The oxytocin doesn’t just induce feelings of pleasure, it stimulates empathy and compassion, which are also contagious, and so we infect each other with kindness and that is when the human race is at its finest.

Conversely, when someone doesn’t like me, I can sometimes smell it. In the past, if I picked up that whiff of a sneer, I’d turn myself inside out to get their approval, attempting to be hilarious, which always backfires because they can smell your desperation too. Nowadays, though, if the hate-smell is strong, I just retreat because I have learnt that how someone sees you is really none of your business; it’s the film they’re playing of you, nothing to do with you, so move away from the building.

Connection From Birth

You can run, you can hide, but it’s in your DNA to connect. Henry Thoreau was one in a million in being able to live alone on Walden Pond out in the woods for years; the other 999,999 people who attempt it would go nuts in all that isolation and end up gnawing their own legs off.

It’s perfectly simple, we all want to be happy so we hunt for others who can press our ‘happy button’; this is why comedians have jobs. When they make someone laugh, they’re only really switching on their audiences’ endorphins and, even better, charging money for doing it. They make them pay for something the listeners are manufacturing in their own brain; comedians are just fluffers, turning on everyone’s happy juices. And that feeling of shared exhilaration spreads like wildfire through the room. The bursting feeling of bonding happens when people understand the same joke. Then they feel connected, stress levels lower and the oxytocin flows, making them feel like they’re all tucked up safe and sound, sucking their collective thumb. When we laugh together, it implicitly means we see the world the same way and that’s when we go into bond mode. Words and actions can be misinterpreted, but laughter signals pure unadulterated mutual recognition. Cows moo to find each other, sheep bah, horses neigh. Humans laugh. This is how we recognize our tribe. (Boohoo is also a globally identifiable noise but it’s not so much fun and people don’t like you for passing it on to them.)

My Story

I remember once going to a Born Again Evangelical meeting. (I wish I believed in Jesus, so many of my problems would be solved.) You go into those churches and everyone’s clapping and singing unashamedly, heads thrown back, uvulas flapping. You can and are encouraged to hug your neighbour without being hash-tagged as a pervert. You actually have to ‘love thy neighbour’ because those are the rules. Nobody minded there that Jesus and I weren’t on first-name terms. God bless him, the priest took my hand and led me to the front, put his hand on my head and threw me into the arms of two ‘brothers’, while whispering in my ear how to talk in tongues. (Basically, you foam a lot while blithering.) I’m telling you, I felt wrapped in a duvet of love. It was like my body was filled up with some warm liquid or like I’d swallowed a purring cat. For a moment. Then, when I left, I felt only envy for their united faith in ‘Him’ while I, the imposter, skulked off to my isolation where I continued to hunt for my tribe. Guess who’s happier? Me or the believers? Duh!

Linking Brains

About 100,000 years ago, our brains increased to three times their original size. Neurons suddenly started to connect at a crazy pace, like trees sprouting branches in fast motion. This larger brain didn’t evolve to give us the ability to beat the competition as is believed. We grew more neural connections to make more social connections and a strong network ensures survival. If no one has your back, you might as well be dead meat. So, the more neural connections, the longer the contact list.

This increased brain size gave us more advanced ways of playing with and supporting each other. It’s not just that we socialize in order to live, it turns out that we live in order to socialize.

But another part of our human condition, which is a bitch, is that we’re pulled between wanting to be in with the crowd and wanting to be alone, as Greta Garbo kept saying, and boy, did they leave her alone in the end.

My Story

This is the quandary that can tear us apart throughout our lives and I know this in my deepest bowels; if I’m not invited to a party I feel bereft, and if I am, I’m even more miserable, knowing that I’ll have to jerk myself into a rictus of hilarity to seem interesting and therefore be invited to more parties … which I’ll hate.

Even the words ‘drinks party’ freeze my blood. There’s that sick-making moment when you enter the ‘drinks party’ room and everyone seems so adult, chuckling in relaxed clusters, holding their glass of ‘bubbly’ (I hate that word even more). I’m in a sweat, dizzy with anxiety over who to approach; scanning like a buzzard for who looks interesting and who, if anyone, might be interested in me (I mean the real me, not the one who improvises her schtick on the spot, to amuse and cover the fear that someone might suss she’s not that smart or, worst of all worsts, that she’s boring). Why does it always feel like I’m auditioning to play the part of someone scintillating and why does it matter so much that someone I’ll never see again or who I don’t give a shit about, likes me? Like dancers, the rest of the party people seem to know when to move to a new partner or remain chit-chatting to the person they’re facing. They seem to know when to turn and move away gracefully. I have not received the choreography notes so I just stand like a startled skunk before you run it over while someone spews at me a full report on their child’s grades in face-painting (I think their kid is twenty-five).

But one thing we do have in common is that we’re all judging each other within seconds of a sighting. I instantly start sniffing out whether I’m smarter, more successful or more talented than they are and they’re doing it right back at me. All the while you’re getting ‘in-coming’, subtle feedback on where you are on the totem pole of popularity. You can tell how you’re doing by the flicking of eyes away from your face in mid-sentence, indicating you’re dead … you may splutter a few more witticisms, but you’re fried, they’ve spotted a higher being over your shoulder.

The lesson here is, stay at home … but then you’re alone and start having that ‘no one likes me’ kick in the heart. I don’t know which is worse, suffering the pain of isolation or having to listen to someone’s views on Brexit. Both make you want to kill yourself.

Frazzled Cafes

This is exactly why I started my charity called Frazzled Cafes. I wanted to create a safe place where small groups of people could meet and speak honestly to each other without the fear of appearing weak. My belief is that being vulnerable isn’t being weak, it’s being human. I created these cafes for people I described as ‘frazzled’, which isn’t a mental illness, it’s just the state most of us find ourselves in when our lives got faster than we could live them and so we went into a tailspin. I thought, why not find a group of like-minded people who also want to find where the ground is? A meeting place where we could cut the cocktail crap and talk straight from the heart. This mode of communication isn’t mutual moaning, nor is it delivered in po-faced seriousness (I’m often at my funniest when I’m most honest), it’s where we mutually abide by the rules of authenticity. It’s not therapy or self-help, it’s more like a club where you have to go as close as you can to being genuine. When I go to a Frazzled Cafe meeting and listen to people spill their lives, with no frills, I leave feeling liberated from my feeling of isolation. No theatre, concert or lecture can ever give me that same feeling of elation as when a meeting is over and we all feel that universal bond, like our hearts are all chained together on the human charm bracelet. These people are strangers when I walk in but each time I leave, I love them because they were brave enough to show me a little piece of who they are. If you want to come to a meeting in one of the many cafes up and down the UK, please sign up on FrazzledCafe.Org.

I’m aware that in every city, town and village there’s an endless stream of groups where you can meet people with similar interests: pot-throwers, foodies, the over-sixties, young mothers, over-eaters, volunteers, clubs for everything, including groups who like to have sponges thrown at them, educational courses and, let us not forget (even though the numbers are dwindling), churches, synagogues, Buddhist centres, mosques and so on … These all create community because of shared interests or being with people who are like you. Please don’t think I’m overlooking meetings where people have a common mission to help in areas where the system has failed; Extinction Rebellion, Help the Aged, soup kitchens and food banks, etc. (I will cover some of them in the last chapter, titled ‘World Savers’.) What I’m talking about in this chapter is the kind of community where we’re not bound by our similarity, but one where diversity is valued because the members have recognized each other’s sameness. If you peel back anyone’s skin (please not literally) you’ll find someone just like you and that is when the world loses its terror and we all become the human race.

I realize these types of ‘honest talk’ get-togethers are not for everyone; some people may actually prefer swigging poison to joining that kind of group, but it’s what I’m after (and it’s my book). Maybe if I’d had an extended family who loved and supported me whatever I did and we’d all spent Christmases together laughing around the tree, I wouldn’t feel the need to find that kind of compassionate community, but I didn’t, so this, for me, is the next best thing.

My Story

Whenever I used to watch those animal docs, I always identified with that lonely elephant who strayed from the herd, lost forever, until they keeled over in the dust. I knew what that felt like. When I was young, I lived across the street from a public park and watched families and groups of friends having picnics; old and young, laughing together as they barbecued chicken and ladled out the slaw. I was smothered in envy, sitting in the picture window next to my dog, who also wanted out (though his ambitions were slightly different to mine; he just wanted someone to hump and my mother refused to let him out unless he was connected to a leash). I wouldn’t even have needed a chicken leg, I just wanted to be in their barbecued warmth. Maybe in real life those happy families hated each other, but from my POV, it was the American dream. This yearning could have been because I was an only child and felt I needed a larger group of people to protect me from my unhinged parents whose idea of child-rearing involved using a belt for ‘teaching me a lesson’. My short-fused father once chased me across the street while trying to smack me for some misdemeanour. I ran into a random house and instinctively the family formed a circle to protect me from a wildly flailing and shouting daddy. This could be why I’m always looking for this kind of igloo of human warmth to protect me from potential danger.

Another place I found salvation was at a summer camp called Agawak, meaning dead Native American or something. The only reason I’m sane (though some would argue) is because my parents sent me each year to the North Woods in Minocqua, Wisconsin, among the evergreens and lakes, where we campers, free of the oppression of ambitious parents, lived in log cabins.

Free at last! I can still sing, much to my friends’ distress, 447 camp songs. (If I’m drunk, I try to sing all of them at parties. For example – this following song is sung to the tune of ‘Smoke Gets in your Eyes’ – ‘When camping days are through, we’ll remember you, blue team. The friendship and the trust have always been a must, I’ll always be true … to you.’ I’m weeping now as I’m typing this.) On day one of camp you’re assigned to a team, either blue or white. To this day I will take a bullet for any fellow blue. Back in the day, we would pummel the white team in life-or-death canoe races, using our paddles as weapons. I went to camp for eight glorious years and at the end of my time there, my parents had to drag me out by the ankles, my nails deeply embedded in a totem pole. Ever since, I’ve been looking for a replacement for the blue team.

Then when I had kids, I was in dire need of a tribe. It’s probably a primal pull-back to the old Homo erectus days about 400,000 years ago when I was young and all us new mothers shared childcare around the fire, our dangling breasts available to anyone who needed filling up like human petrol pumps. So when I became ‘a mother’, I, more than anyone else I’ve ever known, needed other mummies to help me, as I was useless at basics like which side up do you lie the baby when changing nappies? I did find other mothers to help me and some I’m still friends with and love. There were others, however, who were bores, always yabbering on about how engorged their cervix was on delivery. I had nothing to contribute as I had been on drugs when I gave birth and had no memory of the event. I remember one mother at a coffee morning holding forth on what a disgrace it was that someone’s dog was excreting in the communal gardens. She called it her ‘anti-poo’ campaign where she put little flags in the dog stuff that said, ‘Whose is this? Would you like me to do this on your lawn?’ (I swear this is true.) And she wanted me to join her vigilante team.

A few years ago, I had the idea (I didn’t tell Ed, my husband) that I would invite hand-picked people to live in my house, creating a community at home. The kids had abandoned me when they left home, so screw them, I decided to find replacements. I got my first inmate, Thubten, the monk who eventually helped with my last book and who toured the subsequent show with me. I had heard him speak at a conference and immediately asked if he’d like to live in my house whenever he was in the UK. (Thubten is a mindfulness teacher/globetrotter, from Google to universities to the UN.) I’ve given him a little monastery he can call his own at the top of the house. So when he’s in town, he comes down the stairs in full robes and either we meditate together or he makes me laugh with his outrageousness. I tell everyone I invited him to live with me because he matches my sofa but it’s really because he gives great lines, which I steal. I also use him to return things that I’ve bought when I don’t have the receipt. He can go into any shop because no one would think a monk would pull a fast one.

Also in my search for community, my friend and editor of this book, Joanna Bowen, rented me a shed on her farm, which I turned into my Nano house. (Nano is a tiny one-room building for smaller living.) In mine, I sit at my desk in front of a large window facing cows and fields. She lives in the big house with her enormous family and a non-stop stream of interesting people.

I’ve met graduates who grow artificial meat, architects, newspaper editors, authors, actors, farmers, chemists, and once Prince Harry walked through the kitchen, I do not know why. I even met my neuroscientist friend, Ash Ranpura, there, who along with the monk, helped write my last book and also toured in my show. He too now sometimes stays in my London house. Anyway, when I go to the Nano, I can walk thirty feet to Joanna’s house to communally eat with fascinating people or stay in the Nano where there’s nothing but silence and cows.

Future Communities

I am just reminding you all, including myself, that this book is about the good news and this chapter is supposed to talk about how we’ll live in the future. I keep finding books and articles which seem to spread dread of even more isolation, which the doomsday soothsayers predict because of rising populations that are inevitably heading for a soulless dystopia of high-rise hell. Even now you can see those towers are being ghettoized, cut off by spaghetti-looping motorways. High-rise islands of offices, living spaces, restaurants, supermarkets, shops, nail bars (God forbid there are no nail bars. You may be a mental wreck or the size of Bolivia but as long as your tips are coloured everything is fine), so you never have to leave your walled city. To me, these clustered, entombed glass-and-steel fortresses all look the same as each other, with the same branded shops. The inhabitants will no doubt also go the way of Gap, all becoming identical.

We are told that people prefer anonymity to limit the Big Brother-type surveillance; the walls, the forks, your fridge is spying on you as we speak. The trouble is, yes, you can have your privacy, but what about social ties? No longer can you borrow that cup of sugar from the neighbour; they probably won’t even unlock their door for you, fearing you might rob the place or take the dog as a hostage. In the old days, if you needed a plumber, a babysitter or a shoulder to cry on, there was usually someone in your building who had those skills or at least could suggest someone they knew to help. Now, we have to call agencies to get someone over and then pay through the nose for their services.

But rather than live in teeth-chattering fear about what’s here and what could be coming, let me steer your attention to the hopeful signs that might point to an exciting future. So, what’s on the horizon and what are the more enlightened city planners and architects working on now?

Urban Planning: The Good News

We’ve only lived in cities for the last 6,000 years so we’re in the foothills of what works to make a more human-centric neighbourhood. Previous developers had no idea what they were doing; one monster building, almost touching the clouds, is at arm’s length to the next and the next to the next … They can watch their neighbours’ television through the window but will probably never make eye contact with them.

But now planners have woken up and come to the conclusion that we need to create developments which help us live together rather than sitting in separate pools of loneliness, once in a while sending out tweets like ships sending out flares to say they’re sinking. They’ve realized that the designs of cities aren’t actually conducive to human beings who might want to make contact with other human beings and that blocks of flats surrounded by empty communal spaces don’t work as well as closely spaced housing with wiggly paths connecting them to encourage people to mingle.

Julian Agyeman, an urban planner, thinks that the future of humanity is going to be mostly urban and that spaces should encourage the sharing of resources. In his book Sharing Cities (co-authored with Duncan McLaren), he proposes a new ‘sharing paradigm’, encouraging trust, connection and collaboration. Case studies of various city projects show how sharing could ‘shift values and norms, encourage civic engagement and political activism, and rebuild a mutually collaborative support system’.

One of the case studies in his book is on the city of Copenhagen. The Danes have not always been keen sharers but as the famous urban designer Jan Gehl says, ‘People of any culture are the same the world over. They will gather in public if you give them the space to do it.’ Copenhagen is encouraging people to spend a longer time in its public spaces so that they are less focused on their destination and enjoy the journey. So the street architecture (benches and planters) are supplemented with brightly coloured adult-sized hammocks made from recycled fire hoses luring you to lounge, swing and linger. Seventy-five per cent of buildings have glass walls on the ground floor to make it possible to see in and out. (I love nothing better than being able to see into people’s homes although they don’t like it as much as I do.)

One of the sites is in the most ethnically diverse area, Nørrebro, a park designed to ‘reflect diversity’ by filling it with artefacts and structures from fifty different cultures; you can gather on Iraqi swings or Brazilian benches around a Moroccan fountain under Japanese cherry trees while eating international cuisine. You’ll never have to travel again.

There’s also the most developed cycle network in Europe with cycle paths running between the parked cars and the kerb so that the parking becomes a barrier between the bikes and traffic. (If you get out on the passenger side of your car you can score a home run by sending the cyclist flying into the outfield.)

The City of Cyclists hopes to be the world’s first carbon neutral city by 2025 and in 2014 was awarded the European Green City Award.

Living Cities

‘Living cities’ have started to sprout in places like Singapore where the government subsidizes green buildings. They grow plants and shrubs like sideways forests all over the walls of skyscrapers, called ‘vertical gardens’. (Mowing them may prove hazardous.) This cools the buildings, absorbs carbon dioxide and attracts wildlife which may otherwise be dying out. Imagine looking out of your window and seeing a beaver climbing up your wall. Who do you call?

Also, in these cities they’re encouraging ‘green roofs’ where a garden is built on the fortieth floor or beyond. The trouble is, unless you’re building from scratch, how do you convert a huge city to a non-carbon one? If you’re in China, there’s no problem, you just announce you want a zero-carbon mega city on pain of imprisonment and, boom, it’s up within hours.

Another project in Asia is led by an architect called Kengo Kuma, working in Tokyo, who says, ‘I want to reshape the city. I want to break space up and return things to a smaller scale.’ This includes planning for more trees and parks; places where people can make connections with one another. Tokyo had to develop very quickly after the war which is why it grew in such a haphazard and squashed way, leading to a syndrome called kodoshi, meaning the lonely death. He goes on to say, ‘My students all live in shared housing now. That’s new; we’ve been living in isolated spaces, separated by concrete. People don’t want to do that any more.’ He also wants to create village-sized communities. I say good luck to him, in a population of 126.8 million he’ll have to build them in the sky. (And they’ll have to find space for all those waving plastic cats and terrifying dolls with giant eyes. They have rights too.)

Non-tech Solutions to Urban Living

Julia Watson, a lecturer in urban design at Harvard and Columbia Universities, has suggested really interesting non-tech solutions to keeping cool without relying on air con, which is one of the biggest contributors to carbon emission. Covering the rooftops in trees and plants can cool a building by 60 per cent. She says the high-tech ideas for cities are born out of ‘the same human superiority-complex that thinks nature should be controlled’. Instead of trying to be smart, she suggests ways to be dumb and just let nature do its thing without interfering too much. You can grill a pork chop or sunbathe on a lounger while the greenery helps suck up rainwater, lowering the risk of flooding, helping reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions … but I have vertigo so I won’t be living there.

Floating Cities

I love this idea. In Asia, about 3 million people move from the countryside into cities each week, and the majority are heading towards coastal cities which now contain over half the world’s population. The UN Habitat prediction is that by 2035, 90 per cent of all megacities (over 10 million people) will be on the coast. So a solution being floated by the UN is ‘floating cities’. Oceanix City, or the world’s first sustainable floating city, will consist of groups of hexagonal platforms, anchored to the seabed, that could each house around 300 people, effectively creating a community for 10,000 residents. Cages under the city could harvest scallops, kelp or other forms of seafood. Marc Collins Chen, the chief executive of Oceanix, says the technology to build large floating infrastructure or housing already exists.

I’m picturing a scenario where, in the future, if you want to go on holiday, you simply up anchor and move to the destination of your choice; the problem would be that the whole neighbourhood has to come too.

BedZED Eco-community

Closer to home, in London, there’s an eco-community called BedZED that’s now twenty-five years old. In the middle of a normal-looking South London street, there’s a very cool living complex where they have no heating bills, solar panels, green spaces, a large allotment for growing your own vegetables and a communal space where you can learn yoga, karate, cooking, dancing and drink and have coffee. I almost turned around to pack my bags and move in. This complex is owned by the Peabody Trust, a housing association which has moved with the times and alongside BedZED acknowledges that ‘poorer people are in the section of society that will suffer first and foremost if we do not find a more sustainable way of life’. So BedZED has become a test bed for developers and builders to learn about the future of housing, particularly social housing.

Hundreds of residents live in the two-storey, glass-fronted flats, all facing south (sort of greenhouses – known as sunspaces) to absorb the heat, keeping everyone warm – even in the winter. The second floor is made of carved, curved wood, bulging out of the glass porch, giving the impression of tree houses. At the very top, on the roof, are lush, riotous gardens. The rows of buildings have a cobblestoned space (not for cars) between them so kids can play safely because everyone can see them. Even if you don’t care about the zero carbon emissions, there are other benefits: the residents care about each other. You need help? The whole place has your back. You want privacy, you have your own piece of land to grow what your heart desires, and if you want to mingle, there are communal dinners and social nights where the inmates dance to live music. Everyone looked happy. Maybe they put it on for me and, when I left, they all became bitches again, but I doubt it.

So, there you have it, green shoots growing in London, which shows that if you create the infrastructure people will come and once they have tried a place like this – built on good intentions – they will get a taste for this kind of life.

Intentional Communities/Ecovillages

If living in a city isn’t for you, rural ecovillages are now becoming the last word in communal living. These already exist so you don’t have to hunt in a haystack. I have the Communities Directory, it’s about four inches thick filled with thousands of intentional communities and co-housing projects in almost every country in the world. The plan is to build 77,000 new ecohomes by 2024. I visited a few communities and even though there are problems, they deliver what it says on the tin. I’m not a natural-born eco-person – I fly, I drive, I do other bad, non-greeny things – but I’m sick to death of listening to conversations at dinner parties about what a shame it is that the world is going to melt in ten years. Now that I’m ‘woke’ I’ve started to say to these verbal do-gooders, ‘Get off the pot or shut up. If you’re so upset by the world, go off-grid and Thoreau-it-up.’

These intentional communities shouldn’t be confused with the communes of the 1960s where it was all about free sex and sharing pans of beans. Even though that’s where they started. I wanted to live in a commune back then but alas was too young and my parents would have killed me. There was one called ‘The Pig Farm’ which had an entrance lined with ten Cadillacs buried in the sand; the front parts deep in the ground, the tails jutting straight up into the air. Why they did this, I have no idea. I guess if you’re stoned enough it makes sense. Anyway, it’s probably good that I was too young, I’d be a casualty from bad acid by now.

Nowadays, the old-fashioned commune where an orgy was just another night in has been replaced by a group of like-minded people who want to create a carbon-free, zero-emissions, sustainable community. The villages are well designed; sleek, gorgeously landscaped wooden houses surrounded by lush flower and vegetable gardens. Unlike in the past, the residents don’t just sit around on cat-hair sofas smoking weed, they work in nearby towns or from home. I’m sure they still smoke weed but they have jobs and a fully functioning brain.

To get to the roots of the intentional community movement we have to find the Mother of all of them … and she is in Scotland, near Inverness.

Findhorn Community

It was founded in 1962, doing eco before it was even a word. I won’t go into too much detail as to how the place started because you might just shut this book, never to open it again, or think I’ve gone off with the fairies (literally, because they played a big part in the beginning). So trust me on this and keep reading because fifty-seven years later, what started as a pioneering intentional community in the early 1960s has turned into a hotbed of serious innovation that just might be able to save us and the planet.

History of Findhorn

It was love at first sight when Eileen clapped eyes on the very dapper, blue-eyed Flight Lieutenant Peter Caddy of the RAF (they would become the founders of Findhorn). She was a mumsy housewife sewing on buttons, married to another RAF officer. She didn’t leave her husband simply because she fancied the blue-eyed one, it was because they found that they both shared a vision and they were highly spiritual and believed they had a joint higher purpose. (Okay, this is where I get off the bus.) It turns out, as it happens, that Eileen had a direct hotline to God so she received messages from Him and passed them straight on to Peter who then planned what they would do next. (I’m immediately imagining saying to my husband, ‘Go wash the dishes, God told me to tell you.’ And him telling me to ‘Fuck off.’)

Peter and Eileen were offered a job in the north of Scotland, managing a hotel, Cluny House, a one-hundred-bedroomed place that needed more than a little work done on it. They were very successful for a while but eventually Peter was fired because he was making his decisions based on Eileen’s messages from God and in the hospitality biz that just doesn’t cut it.

With nowhere else to go, they moved into a nearby caravan park, living in a two-room trailer about fifteen by eight feet, and sharing it with their three children (did I mention she had children with Peter?) and their friend, Dorothy. Even more challenging, they were parked in some sand dunes, usually in gale-force-ten winds, next to a garbage dump. Eileen at this point couldn’t hear what God was trying to say, what with all the noise in the caravan and the wind bashing the tin walls, so God suggested she go to the municipal toilet block between four and six in the morning. Of course, Eileen obeyed and sat on the loo at those hours picking up messages from above. She was told something like, ‘Build a magic garden and the people will come and this will become a great community, a city of light.’ All this from the loo.

Eileen’s message was to let Dorothy guide them on the garden, where and what to plant. Dorothy had no previous experience in horticulture; however, she could now also pick up gardening advice from plant spirits called ‘devas’ and, to everyone’s astonishment, vegetables sprung from the sand; not just normal ones, but cabbages weighing in at forty-two pounds. Soil experts visited, shook their heads saying it was impossible, and declared it a miracle, and so the people began to come … in droves. Like the vegetable version of Woodstock, it attracted hundreds of, probably stoned, New Agers.

You would imagine Eileen looked like Janis Joplin, with nervous-wreck hair, wild eyes and a vodka bottle sewn on to her lips, but no, with a prim pair of spectacles and a perm, Eileen might have been mistaken for anyone’s grandmother. Every night she and Peter changed for dinner and insisted all residents do likewise. (Let’s picture this: Peter in a kilt, Eileen in an evening gown and the other guests in never-washed-before kaftans and bird feathers.) By the late 1970s, mixed among the ‘unkempt crowd’, as Eileen called them, were people who shared her vision, guided by the direction of the ‘clear small voice within’. Over the years, it slowly crept from what was referred to as ‘The Vatican of the New Age’ to what it is now: the global centre of ecological innovation and sustainability.

No longer a simple caravan park, the community now has 600 residents and 1–2,000 extras living outside in the old Cluny hotel and the village of Findhorn but still part of the foundation.

The houses come in all shapes and sizes, made of shingled, multicoloured wood, heated by solar panelling and biomass heaters (woodchip-fuelled boilers); waste is turned into clean water and all rubbish is boiled and recycled into a fertilized soil where flowers now bloom. This means your shit can eventually grow a garden.

Findhorn is set in woodland (remember, all grown on sand), with actual neighbourhoods; some swanky, some affordable housing, many made with turf growing on the roofs, some made of wooden whisky barrels. There are meditation areas, schools, offices, organic gardens, a 600-seat theatre, cafes, art studios; clearly God knows a thing or two about landscaping and architecture. A higgledy-piggledy path connects them all, a little like in the land of Oz. The population is made up of paid workers, lawyers, business people, therapists, doctors, entrepreneurs, artists, the elderly, babies and everyone in between.

Day 1

My friend and editor, Joanna Bowen, went to Findhorn with me. I was writing about it so we were given the place of honour to stay in, Eileen’s final resting place. One of her children lovingly built her a beautiful two-bedroom house crafted to perfection. It was in this house that we found books about her life and, let me be honest, I was completely spooked. I was sleeping in her bed and got paranoid that she didn’t like me being there. I assumed even though she was dead, she’d know I was a non-believer and would return to kill me. First, she clearly tried to freeze me to death because there was no heating. They told me it was turned on, but these people are so hearty, some of them wear shorts (it was zero degrees in December) so they don’t feel the elements like a Princess does. They brought me heaters and I turned the place into a sauna, which I know Eileen was furious about. Isn’t that strange, I don’t believe she talked to God and there I was talking to her. So I went to sleep that first night, terrified.

Day 2

Each morning there’s optional group meditation so I’m sitting there for half an hour, not calm at all but frozen like a solid block of fear. I detected a flicker of breath so I knew I was alive, otherwise, frozen. My teeth were actually chattering and in this state I went back to Eileen’s. Janet, our guide, said that many people from London are shaken up the first day from suddenly dropping into this strange new land where everything moves at half-speed and everyone’s nice, so you feel safe. Now you can start to feel things other than that slowly percolating anxiety. And what I felt was pure panic. After a while, having cooled down emotionally, I thought back on my normal routines and I came to the conclusion that I’m insane.

48 Hours Earlier: An Example of My Life

Two days ago, I did a mindfulness talk for MI5 in the morning (it seems they’re under a little stress) and in the afternoon I spoke to 500 tube builders in their bright-orange vests and hard hats who were digging the new underground station at Vauxhall and Battersea. It seems they’re under a little stress too, so much so that there are more suicides in this job than any other. (They work outrageous hours and literally don’t see daylight because their shifts are so long.) I asked if they felt it difficult to tell someone when they felt they might be approaching the edge? They were silent. I guess they don’t talk about their feelings much in a black hole halfway under London. Then one of the more hulky men stood up and proudly announced, ‘I have my friends here, there they are [he pointed at them]. I told them I wanted to kill myself. I even went to the bridge and planned how I would jump. I talked about it to my friends and they talked me out of it. I know they really care about me and I care about them.’ May I say the whole room burst into applause. At the end, I suggested we do a little mindfulness and I thought they would surely protest … but no, I looked up and I could see 500 hard-hatted hard guys with eyes shut, calmly breathing.

I had to run from that to get a train to somewhere in Wales to do a show that night. I missed my stop because I was writing this book, didn’t understand the Welsh station announcement (I thought someone was coughing up a hairball) and realized I wasn’t going to make it to the theatre on time. A woman on the train heard me panicking/yelping over the phone to my stage manager, phoned her husband, who met me at the next station, and they drove me at top speed to the theatre. Such is humanity on a good day. I gave them tickets to the show and kissed their feet many times.

Then yesterday I took a train back to London from the north to change trains to get to another show I was doing in the south. Anyway, when I got on that train, I realized with a zapper to the heart that my computer was missing. I bounded off and barked at some railroad person to point me to the lost-and-found. So, holding multiple overloaded bags, I hunch-backed-of-Notre-Dame raced there to find the lost-and-found, which can’t even find itself, it’s so hidden – it’s easier to locate Narnia. Both of my lungs collapsed on the run back and I heard my back cracking under the weight. I made it to the show and afterwards we went to a dress-up party in an art gallery, staying over at a friend of a friend’s house before leaving for Findhorn.

So I suppose Janet may have had a point that my body was informing me it wanted a divorce.

Day 3

In the afternoon, I went to join a mindfulness session with a group of locals with learning disabilities. They come to Findhorn once a week, do gardening and then meditation. We all walked over from the dining room with the kids with Tourette’s shouting and others making noises, then we went into the meditation room and when the gong gonged, there wasn’t a peep. Total silence as they sat focused on their breathing. After the gong to mark the session was over, the noise began again. I almost cried. It was so profound.

How inspiring to discover that Findhorn has evolved from the old giant-cabbage-miracle days to a community with the highest concentration of social enterprises in the UK (over forty-five). One of those projects is GEN – a UN-recognized enterprise creating environmentally sustainable communities around the world. Some of the founders have become world leaders in creating a vision for future living; I have chosen GEN as one of my world savers in the last chapter of this book.

Though I can’t completely buy into the conversations Eileen Caddy had with God fifty years ago, she was certainly inspired when she said, ‘If you want to do something to help the world situation, look within. As you change your consciousness to love, peace, harmony and unity, the consciousness of the whole world will change.’

I ended up loving Findhorn and if it wasn’t plonked so far up north, with those freezing-your-nose-off winter conditions, I would seriously think about moving there for the same reason other people go: to find a new way of living where we all feel included instead of isolated in our cold and lonely silos of self-absorption.

Anglian Water

Big business is also now getting involved in building communities. I saw it in action when Joanna and I went to see a project set up by Anglian Water to resurrect a failing community. They chose the town of Wisbech by looking on the map of the ‘Indices of Deprivation’ (I had no idea it existed), which is like the X Factor for the worst town in their area, and Wisbech won. Of a population of 30,000, 48 per cent are on a living wage working in potato-chip making, pea-canning or chicken-killing factories and, for academic achievement, they come in the bottom 10 per cent in the UK. The town is filled with immigrants from Eastern Europe, many of whom have seasonal picking work. There was no railway station, no cinema and hardly any shops. I was told that many of the girls’ ambition is to get pregnant. The boys leave school early because there are no jobs, so there is no point. All together, it was a demoralized place.

Anglian Water have started to turn the place around, working with key residents to help create a thriving community centre, organizing a training programme which leads to apprenticeships and jobs, and setting up a homeless shelter. The community has changed and is starting to thrive, and it was astounding to see what big business can do for the good.

And that, folks, is what the next chapter is all about.