 Sorry, I'm sneezing on camera. That's a tough avoid. Take one. Yes. So, what this is about is the permaculture design course, and trying to promote the design course of Jupiter, to get excited about it, basically. And I just want some people who've done the design course and got very excited about it, and gone on and created an amazing right livelihood for themselves, just to tell me a bit about how that happened, and how they were motivated that much by permaculture to do that. Well, it all started around about 1990, when we saw in Grave Danger of Falling Food, with Bill Mollison, and I just thought what an amazing solution to so many environmental problems it could provide. We were just at the time about to buy a piece of field, adjoining our property, and I wanted to create a wildlife garden, and then I thought, well, this is silly, a wildlife garden is great, but why not produce food? Because, you know, so much energy goes into producing our food. This is something that I could actually do for the environment. So that's how that started. I then signed up for a forest garden design course with Patrick Whitefield. The idea of a forest garden sounded very appealing, and something that I could do on this new plot of land. I got thoroughly enthused by Patrick and learned a lot more about the principles of permaculture, and took that away and started designing the garden along permaculture design principles with a friend of mine, a friend of ours, who had just completed his permaculture design course, and so we sort of fed off each other's enthusiasm, and between the three of us, we created the garden that we have here now. And then the opportunity to publish permaculture magazine came along about a year later, and that just fuelled the enthusiasm even more. I started meeting a lot of people who'd seen in grave danger of falling food and had been sparked in a similar sort of way, and we thought there's something very valuable here. Let's try and get this out to as many people as possible. So permaculture magazine came about, various permaculture books and permanent publications, and that was 13, 14 years ago. And so that's how we got to where we are today. And we had an opportunity about seven years ago to, well, I was going to say, demolish half of our house, but the back half of the house, which you see here, was a 1960s, 70s extension, very poorly done, and it was demolishing itself. It was falling apart, basically. So it was either spend a lot of money just repairing it, or spend a little bit more money and do a full passive solar design on it. That's the choice we made. So I did my full permaculture design course. Actually, you did it, yours first. Yes. Yeah, basically I had a baby in 1989 and then another one in 1993. So I had to sort of slot in a permaculture design course in the middle of babies, and it was very difficult to leave a child for two weeks. And in 1992, there was a permaculture design course for women taught by Lee Harrison with childcare. And so I went with a friend and our first daughter, who was by that time just two years old, and did a design course which was organised for women by women. And at the same time, just as we were finishing the design course, Tim was just putting together the first issue of permaculture magazine. So it all happened at the same time. And I came back and was also hugely enthused by the idea of producing food and starting let systems and publishing. I mean, for instance, we designed the forest garden, but we had to sort of interpret Australian literature with Robert Hart's forest gardening book. And so, you know, we said to Patrick, come on, let's do how to make a forest garden, because it was quite difficult to put it all together. We're not trained horticulturists. And it was quite experimental. And we thought if we produced a really practical book about the subject, then people following after us wouldn't make the same mistakes and have to try and find the information. And I think that's been our guiding principle with the book publishing particularly, is, right, what do we want to know and what do other people want to know and how can we produce books that will help ordinary people, not builders, not horticulturists, not architects, do things like build ecological buildings, you know, plant gardens, start let systems, start community projects, et cetera, et cetera. And the guiding principle of the magazine was always to be a solution that orientated as possible and to, I think, express the positivity and optimism and joy of permaculture. Happy little dog. Because there is so much bad news and increasing bad news. Climate change is such a serious issue now. Peak oil, for all its controversy, I think is going to prove in the short term that it is a reality. And we are facing some unprecedented difficulties in the world. And I think, although we have to face realities, we need to see how people are designing their lives to be more abundant, more joyful, more intelligent and simpler as well. And less chain to consumerism and the sort of life that we are being presented as the only option. So the idea of the magazine is to present positive alternatives that are attainable by ordinary people. And really, your criteria was always do I understand it, does it empower other people? You know, we don't have to have a university degree to be permaculture designers. We don't even have to have past exams. It's not about academic thinking. It's about actually becoming more skilled and more capable in very practical ways. And I think that's why it's inspired us. Yes, I've never been an academic. Which is very fortunate and very useful because Tim reads something and if it doesn't make sense to him. Then it's not a useful piece of information. So we then try and work out why it's not easy to understand and then we make it understandable. So hopefully that's what we achieve in most of what we publish. The permaculture design course itself is mind blowing. It can be as academic as you want to make it. What you want to find in it, you know, there's so many avenues to explore and you can go to any debts but the fundamental information is so profoundly straightforward. You know, I felt after my design course like my brain had been turned inside out and I just saw things at another depth of reality. And, you know, you can then apply that thinking to virtually any aspect of living. And, you know, if it's that universal, it has to be, you know, very, very useful. And I think these are the strategies we're going to need to survive in any kind of simple comfort in future years. So how about the future for the magazine and for the publication? Well, yes, it's an interesting question. We certainly don't run five-year plans. If I... I mean, we look at the magazine, when we first started we had 800 readers. 600. 600. We now have readers in 77 countries in the world. We have mainstream distribution in Canada, America and the UK. And we... we calculate, we've probably got about 50,000 readers now. I mean, compared to a broadsheet newspaper, it's still relatively small. But we see it as an organic growth that will continue. And we... the thing I think that is so powerful about permaculture itself is that it is something that can evolve as a way of thinking, as a way of doing, that it's not trapped in its origins, that it's constantly reassessing, adapting, evolving with the people that use it and where it's situated in the world. So, most of our readers are in temperate climates, but not all by any means. And I'm seeing the magazine and the people... what people are sending me and what's inspiring the readers is changing very much so. You know, the old cliche of permaculture being about sort of mulching and compost toilets is just going so fast now. And people are making the links between deep ecology, between architecture, community projects, technology, and permaculture... I mean, I think incredibly important aspect of permaculture is growing food, because that's what requires in a conventional system so much energy, fossil fuels. And it's also... I think it makes people very happy growing food. It's tremendously empowering, it's very positive. It's something that anyone can learn to do. But I also see that the magazine, you know, keeping that core subject, but also exploring other aspects of living, how people can co-operate and live more harmoniously and build their own technologies as well. And that's why we've had a bit of a preoccupation lately with cob and earth ovens, because anyone can build a cob structure. And it doesn't cost very much money. And I think all these low-impact, low-technology, simple ways of building, growing, living, are going to become more and more relevant as we see fossil fuel economy just going out of the window. I mean, today, the day you're filming this, oil is now hit over $70 a barrel. And that will have a profound impact on the economic systems in the world. And, of course, it will hit poorer people, far harder than the richer people. And so we have to equip ourselves with that information to insulate ourselves against what I think will be a very serious economic crisis in the world. And I think in many ways the North is going to be far more radically affected, because the South still has community systems, low technologies, still has some sort of gene bank for growing food in not everywhere, but a lot of places. It's in a way the North that's disenfranchised itself from the Earth that is going to be far more vulnerable. So I see permaculture as being a fundamental strategy for survival in a changing world. And I believe that that design course creates tremendous hope and begins a process of deciding where to focus and learn skills. And I think actually everyone should do it. I mean, there shouldn't be any shoulds, but it would be a great service, I think, to society if many more people did a permaculture design course. The price of oil going up so much, that's going to make it much more, in terms of local economies, they're much more viable. Exactly. And suddenly compete with imported food. Yeah. Yeah. Big changes. Big changes. Very big. And I think it's very frightening. When we actually look at the projections for the future, it's very frightening. Certainly we won't be shipping books out all over the world. We will change our way of presenting information. We'll have to. And probably we will simplify our lives in the future and grow more food and be more self-reliant. And we probably won't need to dedicate so much time on such an intense level to publishing. We've often published slightly at the expense of our personal well-being. And I think that period will come to an end. But I'm not quite sure what we're going to do about that yet. I think the time will come when we'll be really, really valued for our permaculture knowledge and experience. Yes. I quite like to teach people things one day rather than work with a screen. I do teach at the moment, but I don't actually teach permaculture design. But at some point I'd probably like to leave the computerised existence and have more to do with human beings. But we've always felt that we didn't know why, but we just had to do what we did. We had to publish the SK Manual by Patrick Whitefield without funding. Without a fund to dictate in content, it had to be as close as we could make it. I don't know, I mean, Tim designed it. And we felt a sort of strange compulsion to do the things that we've done with the books and the magazine. But I'm sure that there'll come a time when we're not so necessary. And then we'll do other things. Hopefully by then everyone will have got the message. Well, we hope so. Please make us obsolete. Cool. Yeah, great. Thank you. There's lots there. Unless there's anything else you want to chat about. Can we talk a little bit about the house? Yes. OK. Just do it. Go on. Are you all right with me? Yeah, I'm used to it. OK, so the house at the front, as Tim said, we bought it with a handkerchief-sized garden. And it was rather ramshackle and tumble down. And at the front it's two one-up, one-down 19th century flint cottages built from local materials with a couch shed on the side. Farm neighbours. Farm neighbours, yeah. And then at the back it is wavy. Well, it was 1960s flat roof, hung tiles, no insulation, very rattly windows that were all rotting. And we put in Arganfield double glazing. And we insulated the back of the house and we took the roof, we took out the flat roof and ran the roof line to the ridge and built a pitch there. And we thought about building in Green Oak, but our friend, our local friend, because this is a local building, of course, he hadn't got experience in Green Oak. So he said, well, I'd like to use Douglas Fir and it's cheaper. And I know how to work with that. And he basically machined all the parts of the passive solar glazed area in his workshop a mile down the road. And put in the foundations and brought it here and sort of virtually put the frame up in a day. And all of the flint used at the back of the building, Tim swapped for a bottle of wine with a farmer who had a tumbled down building that he didn't need the flints for. So they came locally as well. I'm pretty much everything was local or recycled. The part of the roof that we had to demolish, we took the tiles off it and reuse those. And we had to buy maybe 40% of the roof tiles more, but we reused what we had. The tiles that were hanging on the back wall got recycled onto the pitch of the conservatory. As Maddie said, the flints came from a local farmer. The large that lapsed the back of the building was local timber merchant. A sustainable timber merchant he was as well. And indeed the windows were manufactured locally as well. So we tried to just do everything as locally as possible. And we had to make some compromises. We couldn't afford certain really top eco stuff. And so we had to use materials that perhaps weren't as environmentally sound as we would have liked. But I think in the main it massively reduced the heating bills. It's a lovely space to live in. And we have lots of light in winter and in the summer we grow climbers up to stop it overheating. Particularly as we're at work all day, so we can't open the building. When we're at home though, you just open the windows downstairs and the windows upstairs. The whole thing breathes. And the roofs are breathing roof and the walls are breathing walls as well. It's all designed so that there's no condensation. So it works really well and we're really happy living here and our kids love it.