What made an academic give up his cottage in the Cotswolds to live in a damp yurt and bathe in a barrel?This book isn’t about what it seems to be about: the setting up of a survivalist community in the Scottish highlands. Believing that the collapse of civilisation was inevitable and possibly imminent,Dylan Evans decided to become an off-grid crusader, a pioneer for a future without fossil fuels, or technology,communications and general consolation. But the genuine story of the book is about delusion and depression, about how the appeal of primitivism can so unhinge an academic that he sells a cottage in the Cotswolds to live in a damp yurt and bathe in a barrel.
Structurally, and the book is smart: instead of beginning at the beginning,full of optimism and hope, it begins with Evans in a psychiatric unit, or having been broken by the stresses of running his post-apocalyptic project. The psychiatrist reads back to Evans parts of his founding document – an imagined future of power cuts,martial law and cultural darkness: “Global supply chains snapped. Panic buying ensued, and within a day there was nothing left on the supermarket shelves. Looters took to the streets, and the army was deployed in all the major cities.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com