But this book is aimed at passing the knowedge and wisdom of those groups to the mainstream in a form that is intelligible and palatable. That is why I am sorry to see negative reviews from people who have lived in a bus for the last five years, but there is nothing I can do about it. The positive response to this book from ordinary people all over the contry and the world, plus the mainstream media, more than makes up for the carping from a few activists.

I am also filming all sorts of different off-grid stories around the country as I come across them.

MEETING A WEALTHY OPPONENT OF THE OFF GRID WAY OF LIFE:

Tom was tall, thin as a rake, with a high balding dome of a head. He blared rather than talked, and in his buttonless designer shirt he bobbed and swayed about continuously, punctuating his sentences with guffaws and snorts. He had spent the hour between my phone call and my arrival checking me out on Google, I learned as he showed me through the well-stocked kitchen and simultaneously introduced himself. Now in their late fifties, the couple had bought Allaleigh House in 1983 and for twenty-one years had lived in one of the quietest corners of England. Cars rarely passed, except for the neighbours. The occasional cyclist or walker was the only stranger they ever expected to see. And now this.
It was seven o'clock, and I had feared being drawn into pre-dinner cocktails. To my relief I was not offered so much as a glass of water, but led straight into a formal sitting room with each cushion and magazine arranged at precise intervals and parallel with the surface it was on. The couple placed themselves in two white armchairs facing each other but slightly turned towards me. I sat on the matching sofa. The conversation that followed was largely between Tom and Sally. I was allowed to ask questions, but otherwise I was more like a spectator to their dialogue.
As soon as his bum touched the seat, Tom got on to the subject of my visit. `Of course possession is nine tenths of the law,' was his opening remark. `Once you're in situ you can adopt the moral high ground. Anybody who disagrees with you is making eighteen people homeless and thrusting them onto the rates.' He harrumphed at Sally, who pursed her lips as if she was about to disagree. But before she could say anything he was off again.
The essence of his argument emerged slowly between tumultuous but good-humoured shouts of rage and frustration. If it had been one or two households then he would have had no problem, he said. Sally agreed. `We thought they might camp there for a week or two a year,' she said, but nine households, none of whom had any background of working on the land, was in Tom's opinion clear evidence of a scam being perpetrated on the local council. `There are so many you feel it might double again,' Sally chipped in. Tom was more specific. `We couldn't object to the present numbers,' he told his wife. `They don't impinge on us, but in five years, if they all have 2.4 children there will be twenty-five people up there. How will ambulances or the fire brigade get up and down these narrow lanes? What happens when they get E. coli and start asking for water to be piped in?' He had now worked himself up into a real state. `It's bonkers, just unacceptable.' I certainly would not tell Tom and Sally what I had just learned on my visit to Land Matters - that three of the women were pregnant, and within nine months there would be four children living on the hill. The population explosion had already started.
The conspiracy theorists in the village, said Tom, expected the initial temporary planning permission to be followed by a further application for temporary permission for upgraded homes. Further upgrades would follow over the years, `and then they'll all bugger off with a million quid'. Over the years, Tom had opposed every single barn conversion in the area, and together with other residents had managed to buy up land to prevent the expansion of a nearby golf course. He had seen two farms go in the previous two decades, one to the golf course and another to become `some sort of activity centre for kids'. `Golf courses, hippies - it's all the same thing. Shoot the lot of them!' he roared in tones that no doubt went down a storm at the local village fête. But he had also done his research: he quoted Paul Waddington's book The 21st-Century Smallholder as evidence that you need a largish group if you are trying to cultivate a piece of land without chemicals.
Despite the colourful way of putting his argument, I felt Tom could not be dismissed as a knee-jerk scaremonger. He admitted himself that his opposition to developers was partly nimbyism - an acronym, of course, for Not In My Back Yard - but nimbyism, he maintained, was one of the finest and most British of feelings. To some extent Tom blamed the small farmers for failing to manage their land properly and ending up in a situation where they were forced to sell. But he also cited the farmers as examples of why local resentment against the `hippies' at Land Matters had run so high. His neighbour, a hard-working farmer, had recently applied for planning permission for an agricultural cottage, but he was turned down. `A real farmer with a real son who wanted to build him a house on land that he owned,' Tom shouted at his wife, `and he lost.'
I suggested that perhaps places like Allaleigh could be treated in the same way as agricultural cottages, which received planning permission only for so long as its residents had some form of employment on the land. `No,' Tom countered. There were two agricultural cottages nearby, one inhabited by a motor mechanic and the other by `an emphysemic trustafarian who is selling, for £220,000, because he cannot get up the stairs any longer'. They are not working the land, said Tom, any more than the hippies are working the land - `there's nothing going on up there'. He rocked back and forth like a rabbi at prayer. Tom had seen the planning application, and I hadn't, so I could hardly contradict him when he told Sally, `They are all from W4 or Totnes or Brighton.'