In 2019 we moved to a farm in the Cederberg, three hours north of Cape Town and forty minutes of dirt road from the nearest public road. Time there is measured by the position of the sun. The only reminder of the rest of the world is the occasional jet stripe crossing an otherwise empty sky.
There was one cottage. No electricity, no running water apart from a spring, no internet, no phone signal. The conditions set the rhythm of our days before we had any say in it: up with the sunrise, asleep not long after sunset, connected to each other and the land because there was nothing else to be connected to.
Needs without buttons
Modern life satisfies most needs at the push of a button, which is convenient, and also how you lose track of where anything comes from. Living without the buttons was the most interesting deprivation we have tried. Water arrived because we had piped it from the spring. Light arrived because the sun had charged the batteries. When a tap first ran, or a bulb first lit, the satisfaction was out of all proportion to the event, because we knew every joint and cable behind it, and because the environment that made it possible is the same one that could have crushed the whole attempt.
A municipality of two
Slowly the place took shape. A solar plant. A water system for showers, baths and the gardens. Waste management, because nobody else collects it here. In effect we built a miniature municipality, and then five chalets on top of it. That place became Bliss & Stars.
The year supplied a steady run of problems: baboons eating the watermelons, cars breaking down, mice chewing through cables, dogs chasing snakes, a road dispute, suppliers letting us down, building materials running out in the middle of lockdown. The bush is beautiful and it is also brutal, and it does not much care which one you were expecting that day.
It was the most stressful year we had attempted, corporate careers included. We had also never felt more free. We have been sitting with that contradiction ever since.
