110 Secret 2
There is a slight to this pauperization of a new realm for all, that COVID-19 will possibly collapse the economy?
@raymond_blanc 11:29 04/04/2020; surmise:
The Secret Garden of a new business, growing our own food, down-scaling, using local skills, past-crafts: to rebuild the environment and new jobs. Globalisation will change all that the Lockdown encourages, because the single, cheap, big factory cannot go on, instead of importing our produce from across the Globe, we must think by the seasons, in all crafts.
During Lockdown’s longevity and vigour, to find a vaccine, and return once more as we were, means unfortunately we are getting used to our new ideals. We are left with home-workers, filling the neighbourhoods, while there are bare High Streets. Filled beaches during this Indian Summer, and latent spending as we immerse ourselves in salty water, on a holiday, waiting and anticipating a purer freedom. Will it ever come?
This time, then, is about change, not because we want, or ought to, but because we must change.
We must grasp loving what we do, and how we spend our time. Working on a beneficent World, to improve everyone’s health, and that includes the health of local business. Now is the time to start again if need be. Maybe building on what has come about over the last few months and building bigger this time. It must be better than before, to make it worthwhile, to our neighbour, and similarly if we are our own neighbour, to us.
There are many things wrong with our ever efficient lives, making wrong choices, trying too hard, spending little and too much time, losing the ‘mono’ or incipient idea along the hedgerows, with full beam on, in the middle of the day, as if drunk. We are clearly just wasting our own time. We used to spend hours changing everything, losing the will to live, making no headway, and starting back at the start dissatisfied with everything. Projects get passed between trades, and lose their passion, when we could all do it at home on our own, or with a few comrades, better than before.
We are today according to Apple News, at the start of the biggest recession known to record. This is, therefore, a disaster, and must be rectified. So, what is the secret? But skills. Those we are trained for, and those we have always been inspired to own, to get out of the rat race!
To branch into a niche of craft, makes us feel agile, responsive to our environment, and plain old. But old is the way forward, once we bring it into a new light; one of modernity. There are profound ideals being thrown around Government houses, like Sebastian Cox’s ‘Re-Wilding Britain’ Manifesto. A wilder Britain will help farmers to make a better living, use less chemicals, and make more wild pastures, peat bogs, and forests, for natural wildlife to thrive. This is not, and should not be a lesson in recumbent shallows, to state the obvious to so many, we have lost so much nature, lets finish it off. This is about sustainability. We must save what we have and encourage new species, and near extinct species to survive, for a healthier planet overall.
Cradle to cradle making is ideal for this new vocabulary, in order that we put it back where it came from, and it decomposes back to the ground. I have heard of someone making a whole house from a single tree, using the timber in someone’s trees in the garden to make their very own furniture. We need these ideal concepts, and a trying mind to work it all out.
Essentially, now is the time to re-train.
We should all be able to purchase a house plant for oxygenating rooms, if not we have a fully fledged garden. Our secret garden, is there, and so we can make the mightiest of measures to promise we will tend it. Growing echinacea, gladioli, fruits, and vegetables. No-dig gardening, putting down a timber frame on a lawn, filling with good compost, finishing with the best compost, and sowing seed. Collecting seeds, enrolling pots, encouraging birds, bees, squirrels, foxes, deer, and insects; a pond. The mind continues to unravel a host of possibilities, about just re-wilding a lawn, with meadow flowers.
A study in Germany states, over the last 26 years we have seen a decline in flying insects by a massive 75%. This is urgent, but take your time, to get it right.
Purism, Le Corbusier’s treatise on elemental objects, over the previous Cubist ideal, of all sides shown on a simple 2D canvas, in abstract form, is perfect for this new movement in The Secret Garden. To elementally make food, buildings, art, objects, furniture: house staples, we all need. The idea is about balance, separating right from wrong, beginning with something slightly abstract and not losing that through commerciality. We need sustenance in society, a living, breathing Britain of great virtue to overcome this pandemic, and to build anew by minimal design.
Some of you are thinking great, that is what I am doing. But I am sure the majority read into these paragraphs, and say to themselves: it will never happen, or where do I start from here?
I began aged 11 years old, at Henry Beaufort Secondary School, in Winchester, asking myself, why a cul-de-sac of houses next door to the School had been built with little to say for them about design, similar to the last mass housing scheme. Mock-Tudor facades, pokey rooms, a driveway and garage, pitched roofs, and plastic guttering, porches, in brown, red and white. The epitome of no thought put into a great opportunity for change, and plain ugly. So, I am here today as a fully qualified Architect, ready to change the face of housing projects. I am passionate about it.
But what is my COVID-19 promise to myself, other than to be rich through ideas, I use my brain to think outside the box, and will learn a few crafts before going back into practice, particularly carpentry. I have always wanted to make a chair because it encompasses everything an Architect is about. It has a reason, it sits on the floor, its comfortable, its minimal, and its pure, above all its aesthetically pleasing so you know when you sit in it, you are sat in the right kind of chair.
History is important to design to learn a craft, but we need to be careful not to lose our modernity. If you think cottage industry is a botch, think how many times, you have done that to your own finances, and felt poor at the end of the month. We must prepare for this eventual change, and take the fashion out of life, and back into the workshop. If something is done well enough, we will be duly rewarded. The chemistry of the body is not to sit at a computer all day long. So, objectively, in the name of Utilitarianism, we must demand to our governments the changes we need, and they will respond. Essentially, we need schools of thought, an overall philosophy.
To understand our new vocation may take time, but for every step towards this goal, we will be making a movement back to our environment. I wanted Monouni, to be an ethical commercial business. So, I deal in morals, amongst complexity in my work. But today I want to set the record straight, that now, like Raymond’s quote: this is the best time, to re-think how we live in Britain.
The infrastructure must come from government: apprenticeships, rewarding green companies by a points system, and encouraging bursaries for those less well off, ready to commit themselves to the new frontier. We all had a plan ‘A’ from childhood, that never got played out, do not die wondering what it would feel like to happen. The Prince’s Trust providing funding to anyone under the age of 30. Better public transport, to sell the car and walk to the station. Now is our fundamental chance to re-write the script on the future, so let us do it together.
I expect big discussions over the coming weeks, to completely re-think one’s life structure.
Our problem is of course money, but do not work for it, in a failed system, when it is possible if you try to change for the good, you can do better than before, with more of your own time to enjoy the changing weather.
We need the artistry of life back, before COVID-19, rears its head on making us throw stones at people who live in glass houses. Never give up.
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