The new barbarians:
confessions of a middle-class nomad
Even the middle-class and middle-aged can go wandering looking
for themselves on a kind of ‘walkabout’. Jeremy Atiyah’s tale of abandoning the
trappings of modern life in the first world may inspire you to bust out of your
own confines. Be warned.
January 2003
I am a well-educated man approaching middle age. I am clean and
respectable and have a lot of middle-class friends. But I am writing these
words crouched over a keyboard in a cubbyhole at the top of a ladder above a
friend’s study. For this is the place I call home – at least for tonight. You
see, a year ago I let out my flat with all its contents on the grounds that I,
as a poor writer, could not afford the mortgage. As I entered my 40th year, I
turned myself into a vagabond.
Back then all kinds of people felt sorry for me, including my
new tenants. I did nothing to encourage this: walking out of my front door in
January 2002 with a rucksack on my back, I assured them that I was not
sentimental about mere possessions. ‘But what about your TV?’ they gasped. ‘And
your CDs? And your books? You are leaving them all behind?’
The decision did not feel like a revolution at the time. I had
no family. I had plenty of prior experience of living out of small bags. I had
long ago dispensed with a diary and I owned only one pair of shoes. The
important thing was that I still had a bicycle, an email address and a mobile
telephone. I also had a desk in the British Library. I even had a suit, albeit
a creased one. I could sleep (friends assured me) in their spare rooms and
homes.
I only vaguely wondered what I was. A bloke who had run out of
cash? A gentleman of the road? Or the embodiment of a new Volkerwanderung? The
answer seemed to hinge on how I would react to being homeless: whether I would
pine for my own bed and bath or ride out across the London
At first I suffered no doubts at all. I was delighted to be in
charge of nothing that could break down other than my bicycle (which I could
fix for myself). And I certainly enjoyed having no pot plants to water, no
bills to pay, no car to park, no windows to clean, no dishwasher to empty, no
roof to fix, no drains to unblock, no boiler to service, no valuables to
insure. These freedoms, I felt, were privileges for which the rich would pay
millions.
Another startling realisation was that I could now live anywhere
in the world at practically no cost. Friends from California Italy Barcelona India
It even turned out that I could afford to stay in London
Meanwhile, my abode of final resort, whenever others failed, was
this cubbyhole that can be reached through a hole, via a ladder, in a friend’s
flat. It is a cosy space at the top of a house. It contains a mattress, my
clothes, in piles, and a window overlooking quiet gardens. I occupied it, in
transit, permanently ready for my next move. The perfect solution for a man of
nomadic tendencies? Not quite. But I had been up my ladder for at least six
months before I began to entertain any doubts on the subject.
First, there were the normal problems of communal facilities. As
the man from the cubbyhole, I did not feel entitled to lounge round the house
in my dressing gown. I hardly ever seemed to watch television or listen to
music. I rarely cooked. Above all, I was unable to receive guests, unless they
really wanted to drink tea, crouched in a very small space staring at a wall
two feet away. None did. This, it seemed, was the price I had to pay for my
chosen lifestyle: to have to justify my existence to disconcerted, anxious
friends.
It is hard to do this unless you feel certain of your case. I
found my finances being discussed, in pitying terms, at dinner parties at other
people’s houses. In panic, I took to telling people that I would soon be back
in my own home. ‘It’s all a question of facilitating cash flow,’ I would bark,
‘pending future income!’
For a few weeks last summer, it got too much. I grew ashamed of
my cubbyhole, which now seemed to be overflowing with dirty socks and unpaid
mobile phone bills. My thoughts repeatedly focused on schemes to fund a move
back into my flat. l had almost forgotten about the possibility that my
lifestyle might actually suit me.
Such moments of weakness were to be expected, considering the
obstacles confronting the would-be nomad. I can see this now. For much of
history, I might have been locked up for the way I was living. As recently as
the beginning of the 20th century books were being written on the ‘pathology’
of nomadism. The condition was treated as a sickness, and a hereditary one at
that. Classifications of nomadism included ‘melancholic’, ‘somnambulistic’,
‘epileptic’, ‘impulsive and demented’ and ‘dromomanic’. Gypsies and Jews were
known to be afflicted, though psychiatrists seemed surprised to unearth cases
among even ‘civilised’ peoples such as the Swiss, whose symptoms included
‘tramping aimlessly from one place to another’ and ‘setting fire to haystacks’.
It was in the autumn of last year that I understood the nature
of my challenge: to explain myself to people in a way that would not trigger
off their deepest fears.
I needed to explain to friends that nomadic tendencies did not
make me unique. My latest line at dinner-parties is to explain that man is not
by instinct a sedentary species. The first hominids seem to have migrated large
distances, seasonally, perhaps like birds; the human foot is designed for
endless traipsing.
Does this not mean that we nomadic types epitomise the
‘unhoused, de- centred, exilic energies’, as Edward Said put it, of an ancient
group longing to reassert itself in the modern world? Am I not subconsciously
helping to revive the age-old struggle between wandering ‘barbarism’ and
settled ‘civilisation’?
In the end, this is what I too seem to be: a nomadic revivalist,
lamenting the appearance, 8,000-odd years ago, of more settled patterns of
life. Just as I rely on settled people for my physical survival, so settled
people rely on us vagabonds to provide them with entertainment and diversion. I
cannot hold dinner-parties from my cubbyhole, but I make an interesting guest
for anyone willing to invite me into their home (I believe this was also Attila
the Hun’s forte).
History, it seems, has fallen kindly for me. Two thousand years
ago I would have been slandered as a barbarian. A hundred years ago, I might
have been forced into work as a tinker or a peddler. Today, in Blair’s Britain
After my year of home-free living, I look to the future with
optimism. Friends have got used to my situation and I have decided to sell my
flat and commit myself to this life. True, I have a slight pain in my knees
from crouching, yes, it is a bit cold in my cubbyhole and no, I have not worn
an ironed shirt in months. But I have certainly found my niche in life.
Copyright 2003 Independent Newspapers UK Limited
Jeremy Atiyah is a
freelance journalist who has only one pair of shoes. He's a middle-class man
who decided to abandon everything that was 'owning' him to pursue something
else - a search for his soul perhaps. One day he'll meet himself and become
whole again in that time honoured Aboriginal tradition of 'walkabout'.
